'Facebook Workplace' Has 7 Mln Paid Subscribers

(RTTNews) - Social media giant Facebook's Workplace business tool has breached the seven million paid subscribers mark at a time when jobs have gone remote and is now the new normal amid the ongoing pandemic. The number of paid subscribers has grown 40 percent from last year.

"We built Workplace as an internal version of Facebook to run our own company, and it was so useful we started letting other organizations use it too," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

Workplace from Facebook, launched in October 2016, is a simple and secure online collaborative enterprise software tool developed by Facebook which facilitates online groupwork, instant messaging, video conferencing, and news sharing. It is developed and run from Facebook's offices in London.

Workplace had 2 million paid users in March 2019, 3 million paid users in October 2019 and 5 million paid users in May 2020. It has notched up some big customers such as Virgin Atlantic, Walmart, Telefónica, BT, Booking.com, Deliveroo, AstraZeneca, Starbucks, Spotify and the World Health Organization.

The demand for business connectivity platforms such as Workplace, Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams, have soared after the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic forced millions of executives to switch to working from home.

Workplace's top rival Teams is said to have about 145 million daily active users, which was up 93 percent from 75 million in April 2020.

In October lastyear, Facebook announced a global alliance with Deloitte to help companies use Workplace to meet the challenges of remote working.