Global brand WhatsApp has been named the best brand of 2024 in Globes’ annual brand index, beating out major brands like Google, Netflix, Coca-Cola and Bamba. The brand has always been more than just a messaging app, owned by Meta. It’s a social network used by 98% of Israelis, according to 2024 figures from the Israel Internet Association, with 95% of users saying they use the app on a daily basis. By comparison, YouTube, used by 98% of Israeli internet users, is used by only 52% of them on a daily basis.
The Brand Index was compiled through a survey of 3,500 participants. This is the 21st year that Globes has published the index.
It seeks to be a social network.
The brand was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, who decided to create an app for the Apple App Store. The idea started as an app that would display statuses in a phone’s contact list, showing whether a person was at work or on a call. The founders quickly realized they had a great instant messaging platform in mind. In 2014, Facebook (now Meta) acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion.
WhatsApp began to run into problems under its new owners. Users discovered that Facebook was receiving data through the app to learn how to better target ads. The company was quick to deny that the app was “listening” or reading messages in personal conversations, despite being fined $122 million by the European Commission. Soon after, WhatsApp introduced end-to-end encryption, meaning only the parties involved in the conversation were exposed to it. By 2018, the founders had left the company.
WhatsApp has become more than just a messaging app that allows you to make voice and video calls. It allows business owners to sell their goods and run an entire business model through the app. WhatsApp has become a social network, meaning users can add dozens of emojis to messages, reply to other users, share their words, and more. In recent years, the app has been working to make the experience as community-oriented as possible.
Over the past couple of years, Meta has introduced features like Status, Communities, and Updates. Status is the familiar story from Instagram, which makes it possible to update contacts with what’s happening on a daily basis. The Updates feature is similar to what’s happening in Telegram — creators or entities can create a channel, and readers can then follow them. But beyond all this, the “Communities” feature depicts what WhatsApp really wants to be.
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Instead of having endless groups dealing with work, school, and kids’ extracurricular activities, WhatsApp allows community managers to include all groups in the content to create an organized and shared conversation. This move makes consumers feel like they belong to different groups.
WhatsApp invests a lot of money in introducing features to manage content more precisely. WhatsApp has gained a lot of popularity in Israel in particular. The app works well and provides a great user experience, which convinces Israelis to stay on the app. This is of course in addition to the fact that it is a free app. According to the Bezeq Internet Index, 74% of Israelis would not be willing to give up WhatsApp.
Keeping Israelis informed
Over the years, various apps in Israel have tried to compete with WhatsApp, such as Telegram and Signal, which are important internationally but less important in Israel. The reason for this is not because other apps have failed, but because they have been adopted by consumers.
Last year, WhatsApp ranked fourth in the Globes Brand Index, but this year, as the war continues, it has jumped to first place. In a time of uncertainty, Israelis are eager to get information quickly and directly in order to manage and ease anxiety. The community that WhatsApp provides is even more evident, as Israelis need to stay in touch with their loved ones, stay close to them, and be updated at all times.
In second place in the Globes ranking was the traffic navigation app Waze, followed by Google in third place, and then Bamba, which was fourth last year. Google Maps, Samsung, Nike, YouTube, Microsoft and SuperPharm complete the top ten.
This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on July 11, 2024.
© Copyright Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.
