Consumers in India spend 50 million minutes on WhatsApp video calls on a daily basis, the Facebook-owned communications service announced on Monday. The company’s officials stated that the South Asian country currently accounts for a significant portion of total video calls conducted through WhatsApp every day, adding that the app is currently used for more than 340 million minutes of video calls on a daily basis. Facebook’s service also revealed that it enables over 55 million video calls each day, meaning that the average WhatsApp call lasts six minutes and 18 seconds.
Given how the service currently has approximately 200 million users in the country, it seems that every fourth Indian on average uses the app to conduct a video call each day. The real-world number is likely somewhat different seeing how WhatsApp only discloses its number of monthly active users instead of those who are using the app on a daily basis, but nevertheless, the Facebook-owned service is currently performing rather well in India by most indicators. The aforementioned number of video calls is even more impressive in light of the fact that WhatsApp only introduced video calling in India in November, indicating that the service may grow even more popular in the future. As things stand right now, Indians account for one-sixth of WhatsApp’s total user base that recently surpassed 1.2 billion people and is Facebook’s third most popular service after Messenger and Facebook itself.
Due to its massive popularity in India, WhatsApp recently focused on providing a more localized experience to its users in the South Asian country. As a direct result of those efforts, the service is currently available in ten Indian languages and is expected to receive more India-oriented features in the near future. The company’s officials in the country previously stated that they’re striving to develop their own product without looking at the competition, though their Menlo Park-based leadership seemingly doesn’t completely agree with that assessment seeing how WhatsApp recently introduced a Snapchat-inspired feature in the form of Status. While it remains to be seen how the service will perform in India in the long term, current indicators seem more than promising.