The 98% has no study behind it. The best measured number is 79%, and even that is a floor.

Nobody knows, and that includes us. The best documented figure we could find is 79%. It comes from 13.9 million campaign messages sent across 382 brands.

Even that number is a floor, not a measurement. It is the lowest the truth can be, not the truth. WhatsApp counts reads in a way that has to miss some of them, and we show how below.

The 98% you have seen everywhere has no study behind it at all. We went looking for one, and there is nothing there.

01 / Where it comes fromWhere the 98% comes from

Nowhere we can point you to.

We followed every trail we could find. Every one of them ends in the same place: a company that sells WhatsApp messaging software, stating the figure in its own advertising.

There is no report. No sample size. No date. No country. No method. Nobody even says what counts as an open.

Our best guess is that somebody borrowed it from SMS. A similar number floats around for text messages. That one has no source either.

This matters more than it looks. Ten company blogs quoting each other is not evidence. A number repeated that way is unsourced, however familiar it sounds.

It is like a price everyone at the market quotes because they all heard it from the next stall. The price gets repeated all day long. Nobody has ever seen the receipt. Knowing a number by heart tells you nothing about where it came from.

02 / The best numberThe best number anybody has actually published

One company did the honest thing. It published a figure it had really measured, and it showed its working. The company is Chatarmin, which sells WhatsApp marketing software:

• 13.9 million campaign messages
• 382 brands
• 2026-03 to 2026-05
• 79.0% volume-weighted open rate

That same company says openly that it took down its own 98% claim. No real account it could see was reaching the number.

Two things have to be said about that number, and we have to be the ones to say them. This page attacks other people's statistics. It has to put its own through the same test.

The company measured its own customers, on its own system. That is the same weakness as the famous five-minute lead-response study, which was also a company measuring its own customers, and which we have pulled apart elsewhere.

It is like asking a gym how fit its members are. The answer can be perfectly true and still tell you nothing about everybody who never joined a gym.

So the number leans towards whoever buys that particular product. That is mostly European online shops. It is not a service business in Malaysia.

Taking down your own inflated claim and showing your method is genuinely honest. It still does not turn you into a neutral measuring instrument.

It counts the messages that arrived, not the messages that were sent. On 2026-03-15 Chatarmin changed how it counts and threw out the messages that never landed. So 79.0% means opens divided by the messages that actually reached somebody.

That is the right thing to divide by. Picture a postman counting how many letters were read out of the ones that reached a letterbox, rather than out of the ones he set off with in the morning. It is a small detail, and it is what makes the number worth using instead of decorative.

So we have a number we can use, quoted together with everything wrong with it. It sits nineteen points below the folklore figure. It is still very good next to email.

03 / Every figure is a floorThe part nobody says: every one of these numbers is a floor

Here is how it works underneath. It is the reason we do not treat any WhatsApp open rate as a real measurement.

Nobody watches a WhatsApp message being opened. The read gets reported, and the person doing the reading controls whether it is reported at all.

When a message is read, the reader's app can send a small automatic note back to the sender's system saying so. That note is called a read webhook. Read receipts are the setting behind it: they are the two blue ticks you see in your own WhatsApp.

When somebody has read receipts switched off, that note is never sent at all.

So someone with read receipts switched off can read your message, act on it, walk into your shop, and never count as an open.

Picture a shop that counts its visitors by asking each one to sign the book at the door. Signing is voluntary. Plenty of people walk in, look around, buy something, and never sign. The book is not a count of visitors. It is a count of the visitors who signed. It is always lower than the real number, and the shop has no way of knowing by how much.

So every open rate anybody has ever published is really this sum:

(people who read it AND have read receipts on) ÷ (people it was delivered to)

The top half of that sum is missing a whole group of people. It can never include anybody who keeps their blue ticks off, however carefully they read.

So the real read rate is higher than any figure you have ever been shown. Nobody can tell you how much higher.

And here is the hole we cannot fill. We do not know how many Malaysian WhatsApp users have read receipts switched off. As far as we can find, nobody else knows either. No figure for it has ever been published in this market.

That missing group is the biggest source of error in the whole number. So anybody quoting an open rate to a Malaysian business is quoting a number whose largest unknown has never been measured here.

We would rather tell you that than pretend the 79% is exact.

04 / The wrong metricWhy it is the wrong thing to measure anyway

Say the number were exact. It would still be close to useless for running a business. Email open rate stopped being useful for the same reason.

An open tells you a message was seen. It tells you none of this:

• whether the person could answer without dropping what they were doing
• whether anybody on your side ever saw the answer
• whether the conversation ever reached a person, a booking, or a sale

We have watched all three of those fail on accounts where the open rate looked wonderful. A message opened by 79% of the people who got it, and answered by nobody who can do anything about it, is two things at the same time. It is a 79% open rate. It is also a broken system.

05 / Measure this insteadWhat to measure instead

Three numbers. You can read every one of them off your own account within 30 days, and not one of them asks you to trust a supplier:

1. Reply rate, for each type of message you send. Not opens. Replies. It is the only number that proves a person at the other end did something.
2. How long your side takes to answer. Count from the customer's message to the first reply written by a human being. If your bot answers in six seconds and a person answers nine hours later, the bot's speed is decoration.
3. How much of your traffic lands inside the free 24-hour window. After a customer messages you, there are 24 hours in which your replies are free. This one is about money, not attention. Answering inside that window costs you nothing. Starting a conversation from cold costs a template fee every time.

Each of those belongs to your business alone. You can measure them without asking anybody's permission. And no competitor can have published them already, because they are yours.

06 / What we doWhat we do with this

We will quote the 79%, and we will put the sample size and the dates in the same sentence. That is what a number you can defend looks like.

We will not quote 98%. If you see it on an agency's website, ask them for the study.

Most of the statistics used to sell chat automation lead back to one company blog post with no sample size attached. Asking where a number came from is a fair question to put to anybody. It is a fair question to put to us.

The uncomfortable version: the 98% survives because it sells better than the truth, and nobody has ever once asked the people repeating it where they got it.