META Meta Platforms Inc

By Nathan Olivarez-Giles 

WhatsApp's 1.2 billion users will soon find a new feature that looks like it came straight from Snapchat. The Status tool will let people share photos, videos and animated GIFs with friends, all of which will disappear after 24 hours.

Snapchat has had a feature like this, dubbed Live Stories, since 2014. Facebook Inc., which owns WhatsApp, has been cribbing the feature from its fast-rising rival, Snap Inc., for all of its properties: In August of last year, Facebook's Instagram launched the similarly featured (and brazenly named) Stories, and the company is testing such a feature, also dubbed Stories, for the main Facebook mobile app. WhatsApp's Status is the most recent feature clone.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and Facebook is doing a lot of flattering with Snapchat lately," said Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research, an equity-research firm.

Just like Snapchat and Instagram stories, WhatsApp's ephemeral Status posts can be edited with text, emojis and finger drawings. WhatsApp will give users the option of sending Status postings to their entire contacts list, or to multiple specific users, just as Snapchat and Instagram do.

Mr. Wieser said that given Snapchat's increasing popularity among teens, millennials and advertisers -- not to mention Snap Inc.'s pending $19.5 billion to $22.2 billion initial public offering -- Facebook has no other choice but to directly challenge Snapchat, even if that means looking like a copycat.

Snap Inc., in its S-1 filing, identified the mimicry of its features by Facebook and other competitors as a potentially serious risk, "because of the low cost for our users to switch to a different product or service."

When asked about the striking similarity to Snapchat, Randall Sarafa, a WhatsApp product manager overseeing the development of Status, replied that it is about meeting user expectations.

"As a company, this is something that we think will be beneficial to our user base," he said. "This mixture of photos, videos and GIFs is a new format for messaging that our users want."

One of WhatsApp's biggest advantages is the size of its user base. At 1.2 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is up 200,000 from a year earlier, Mr. Sarafa said. Snap doesn't share Snapchat's monthly active user numbers, but in its pre-IPO S-1 statement, it did report 158 million daily active users on average, as of Dec. 31 -- up 48% from the year before.

WhatsApp also has a geographical advantage over Snapchat.

"WhatsApp has deep penetration in Europe, Asia, Latin America, across age groups. They're popular in places and with age groups that don't use Instagram or Snapchat," Catherine Boyle, a principal analyst at eMarketer, said. "One of Snapchat's biggest challenges will be to reach the people and countries that WhatsApp already reaches."

But Ms. Boyle said she thinks WhatsApp is taking a risk by adding such a media-intensive feature to its otherwise streamlined app. People like WhatsApp because it feels more like a utility, without so many bells and whistles, she said.

"It's simple, it's reliable and it's such a lightweight app that it can run on the lowest-end smartphone just as well as the latest iPhone," she said. "You can't say that of Instagram or Snapchat or even Facebook. So disrupting that for WhatsApp, that's a concern."

And then there is the A-word.

"When it comes to online ads, Google and Facebook dominate. But advertisers don't want to be reliant on two players," Ms. Boyle said. "If Snapchat keeps growing, it would be awfully tempting for Facebook to place ads inside of WhatsApp's huge audience."

Mr. Sarafa said that there are no plans to bring advertising to the messaging app.

WhatsApp's goal is to roll out Status globally, but that will take a few weeks, said Mr. Sarafa. This week, Status will come to WhatsApp users in the France, the Netherlands, the U.K., Spain, Italy, Israel and Saudi Arabia. After those countries are launched, WhatsApp will take some time to make sure the feature is working as intended and reliable, before rolling out to other countries, he said.

Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 20, 2017 12:14 ET (17:14 GMT)

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