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As Facebook strives to keep engagement high in the face of mounting evidence that teenager interest is cooling, it’s vying against a field of messaging apps that are sucking up mobile users’ time and attention.

Chief among them? WhatsApp. Though still unknown to most Americans, the cross-platform chat application, which replicates the text experience through push notifications, has built up a massive global following. It claims to have eclipsed Twitter’s 200 million monthly active users, dominating markets such as Brazil, India, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Italy.

WhatsApp isn’t claiming to be a social network and offers a very different experience than Facebook with its simple user interface and its decision to eschew advertising in no uncertain terms. As the company wrote in a blog post a year ago: “Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption to your train of thought … when advertising is involved, you the user are the product.” WhatsApp did not respond to a request for comment.

Continue reading at AdAge.com