OTT business messaging revenue to more than double over the next four years

A new study from Juniper Research predicts that global revenue from over the top (OTT) business messaging will increase from $3.6 billion in 2025 to $9.8 billion in 2029. This sizeable growth of 265% will be driven by WhatsApp’s transition to a per message pricing model. 

WhatsApp is the largest OTT messaging application in the world, with more than 2 billion users globally, and exhibits even greater dominance in the OTT business messaging market. Therefore, the changes to WhatsApp’s pricing model will have an outsized impact on how vendors monetise OTT business messaging.

WhatsApp’s New Model to Boost OTT Business Messaging Adoption

The report revealed that enterprises found WhatsApp’s ‘conversational pricing’ model to be unnecessarily complex. The conversational pricing model charged enterprises for a 24-hour chat window, rather than by messages sent. This confused many enterprises considering adopting WhatsApp as a business messaging channel.

WhatsApp’s return to a per message model, which enterprises are familiar with, will enable WhatsApp to further grow its market share in the business messaging market over the next four years, with enterprise users able to better gauge their return on investment. Therefore, WhatsApp’s change in pricing is expected to significantly boost adoption of WhatsApp business messaging.

Research author Alex Webb remarked: “To capitalise on this growth, communications platforms must focus on providing management services for key features such as product catalogues and click-to-chat ads. These services will ensure that enterprises have a single management platform for all their WhatsApp use cases; simplifying the addition of features such as click-to-chat ads into their messaging strategies.”

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An extract from the new report, Global OTT Business Messaging Market 2024-2029, is now available as a free download.