Facebook has shown a keen interest in developing or, with its $173 billion valuation, buying mobile messaging apps. Last year, Snapchat, a 2-year-old app that allows people to send disappearing photos to one another, rebuffed a $3 billion offer from the social network.
But the 5-year-old WhatsApp is far more established, and has fetched its owners a far greater sum. By the end of 2013, it had 400 million monthly users, adding 100 million of them in the last four months of the year alone.
WhatsApp is essentially a replacement to traditional text messaging. But unlike costly texts, which eat into cell phone owners' data plans, WhatsApps messages are sent over the Internet, making them free if a phone is connected to WiFi.
"Our mission is to make the world more open and connected," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page. "We do this by building services that help people share any type of content with any group of people they want."
Zuckerberg promised that WhatsApp will operate independently within Facebook, similar to how the photo-sharing app Instagram has been kept separate from Facebook proper after it was acquired for $1 billion in 2012.
So far, WhatsApp has forgone ads and instead made money by charging 99 cents to cell owners after 12 months for use. The app is initially free to download. The subscription change is new territory for Facebook, which over its decade-long existence has reiterated again and again that the social network "free and always will be" on its homepage.
In a blog post, WhatsApp's co-founder and CEO Jan Koum insisted that "nothing" will change for customers. That includes ads: "you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication," he wrote. "There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles."
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