1.3B Monthly Users Use Facebook Messenger

Facebook has announced that its Messenger app now has 1.3 billion monthly users, making it the top cross-OS messaging app in the West.

According to a Tech Crunch news report, the new numbers are an increase from 1.2 billion monthly Messenger users in April and 1 billion in July 2016.

Some of Facebook Messenger’s closest competitors include China’s WeChat with 938 million monthly users as of May, China’s Tencent QQ with 861 million monthly users as of Q1 2017, and Snapchat with 173 million daily users as of Q2 2017 (though not everyone uses it for messaging).

While it took just six months to go from 800 million to 1 billion users, the Messenger app’s growth has slowed down in recent years. It took nine more months to hit 1.2 billion and five months to get the last 100 million. This is a possible sign that the app is beginning to hit saturation in some core markets.

And while it’s struggled with a recent redesign and an attempt to get its Messenger bots off the ground, the video chat has proven popular. The feature had 245 million monthly users as of December, when Messenger added six-way split-screen group video chat. And a new integration into Bonfire, Facebook’s group chat feature, will now allow Messenger’s 1.3 billion users to instantly jump into group video chats without downloading a separate app.

In addition, Messenger has finally started to achieve monetization. Brands can pay to send sponsored messages to people who have already chatted with them, or buy display ads within the inbox, a service that launched in July.

In other social media trends, Facebook also revealed that Messenger Day now sees 70 million daily users posting and viewing photos and video slideshows, six months after launch. But to put that into perspective, Instagram Stories took just two months to get to 100 million users, while WhatsApp Status reached 175 million users in 10 weeks. Both of those now have 250 million daily users each, while Snapchat has 173 million for its whole app.