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> Koum and Acton were openly disparaging of the targeted advertising model. In a WhatsApp blog post in 2012, they wrote that “no one wakes up excited to see mor

> Koum and Acton were openly disparaging of the targeted advertising model. In a WhatsApp blog post in 2012, they wrote that “no one wakes up excited to see more advertising; no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.” They described online advertising as “a disruption to aesthetics, an insult to your intelligence, and the interruption of your train of thought.” So very true.

ggg9990 9y ago
But their WhatsApp business model was not self sufficient. They were charging $1/year which is less than the operating cost of the servers and bandwidth.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  > They were charging $1/year which is less than the operating cost of the servers and bandwidth Are you sure of this? If they have a billion users, they're earning a billion dollars a year off of this. Considering that they don't need to store messages for an extended period of time, or run analytics, do they really need all that much?
  - downandout 9y ago
    Most people weren't actually paying. Apparently, the vast majority of users were granted free lifetime memberships (see comments here [1] and article here [2]). When Facebook acquired it, it only had $10 million in annual revenue [3] against 450 million users. Clearly, most users were jumping on board during times when it was made available for free. [1] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/07/16/whatsapp-goes-free/ http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/07/16/whatsapp-goes-free/ [2] http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/recommendations/whatsapp-messenger-is-currently-free-in-the-app-store/ http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/recommendations/whatsapp-messen... [3] https://www.recode.net/2014/10/28/11632404/facebook-paid-19-billion-for-whatsapp-which-lost-138-million-last-year https://www.recode.net/2014/10/28/11632404/facebook-paid-19-...
    - fasj82 9y ago
      Do you need more than $10M/year for 450M users? As I've said in another comment they barely stored anything server-side and it's known they have a very optimised stack
      - downandout 9y ago
        You do if you’ve been acquired for $19 billion. The founders couldn’t have been naive enough to think that Facebook and its shareholders didn’t have a need to monetize such an enormous investment. Facebook is not a charity, it’s a business.
        DSingularity 9y ago
        Facebook monetizes Whatsapp by limiting its growth. You can easily think of all the “social” functionality Whatsapp could have added in competition with FB and Messenger.
        kerng 9y ago
        Facebook paid 19 billion to buy up competition, as WhatsApp was a threat to the Facebook ecosystem.
        unlimit 9y ago
        That is what I am seeing now here in India, folks in my circle barely post anything to facebook now, all pictures, status messages are on WhatsApp now.
        BurningFrog 9y ago
        If FB pays $19B for every messenger competitor that gets traction, that's a huge incentive to make more of them.
        bryanrasmussen 9y ago
        yeah but now you have to compete with WhatsApp to get that traction, so maybe a hard slog.
  - paxy 9y ago
    In 2015, when WhatsApp had ~1B active users, Facebook said that the overall revenue from it was insignificant enough they they were just making it free. I'm pretty sure it wasn't charging the vast majority of users (which is how it got popular in developing countries in the first place).
    - lucb1e 9y ago
      > Facebook said that the overall revenue from it was insignificant enough they they were just making it free Have you considered that Facebook might not be telling the whole truth? "insignificant" compared to what, how much money Facebook makes off of every extra user (who wouldn't want to pay) on their platform? Making it free can only be a profitable move because of what Facebook could do with the data, not because a few million dollars a year is truly "insignificant".
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    Articles I read when Facebook bought them said they were losing money. Most reports I just Googled were subscription only or plastered with ads but here's financial sheets: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114000047/exhibit991auditedwhatsappi.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Can you provide a citation that pricing wasn’t sustainable? Having been an infra engineer previously, that pricing sounds reasonable for a messaging service based on infra costs.
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    WhatsApp supports free encrypted video calling and picture messaging, even for groups. No way that it was covering costs.
    - detaro 9y ago
      It does now, it did not when it was aquired.
    - saagarjha 9y ago
      Why can't it? End-to-end encryption means you don't need to hold on to pictures for lengthy periods of time, and video calling can be done without a centralized service.
    - testvox 9y ago
      Neither of those costs anything extra to run though. Since it's end to end encrypted with no sever backups the images and video can be communicated directly between the clients, WhatsApp just plays matchmaker.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        It could, but that's not how it does, they store the (encrypted) media in their servers so that both phones don't need to be online at the same time, and also to avoid having to upload multiple times when you send to a group. That said, they shouldn't need to keep them around for that long, unlike FB and similar.
    - GFischer 9y ago
      Video and voice calling are peer-to-peer. The only cost is the signalling server. I have a similar service, and it scales pretty well.
- bkruse 9y ago
  Are you sure? They were adding 1 million users/day http://www.thefactspeak.com/whatsapp-adding-one-million-user-per-day/ http://www.thefactspeak.com/whatsapp-adding-one-million-user... Even at $1/year - their 1.5 billion active users should be an equal amount of revenue. I'd say that's enough to cover the cost of servers and bandwidth.
  - product50 9y ago
    But that is it. If all you want is basic messaging then you are probably right. However, if you are trying to build a messaging platform, which is what probably FB intends to do, then it requires more investment. Today, you might think that that is where the problem. All the users really want is basic messaging. However, in 3-5yrs from today, the reality may be very different (see WeChat or LINE in APAC) and WhatsApp maybe a complete misfit in that world. All good products evolve. For something like messaging, if all you provide is a basic product, then you risk yourself being taken over by default platform apps (such as what happened with iMessage on iOS in US). You need stronger lockins and FB is well suited to provide those.
  - oblio 9y ago
    If you make messenger users pay anything for it, you’ll lose 80% of them on the spot.
- mars4rp 9y ago
  at the time of accusation, WhatsApp was running on 16 servers! Erlang is idle for communication, they had like 1 million concurrent user on each server!!!
  - AlexandrB 9y ago
    It feels like modern web design practices have grossly skewed people’s estimates of what it costs to deliver a service. Text messages are not fundamentally hardware intensive to deliver - unless you add tracking, “machine learning”, ad delivery, and mountains of JS for serving the app itself dynamically.
    - bluedino 9y ago
      Or write the service in Ruby
      - wpietri 9y ago
        I adore Ruby, but I think that's fair. Twitter's failwhale-heavy Ruby experience is a good example. Ruby and especially Rails are good examples of trading hardware for programmer convenience. This is absolutely great when you're banging out an in-house app for 100 people, and there's no problem spending $1 per user-month on hardware. But Twitter's revenue is only $0.60 per user-month, and they need to spend on things besides severs. There is a reason that they needed to switch away from Ruby to a much more complicated architecture: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... I also saw some people go the other direction. They had a Java app for serving a high-volume website. But the developers had a rewrite itch, and the execs were afraid they couldn't get acquired without a more hip technology stack. They even hired a fancy consulting firm to help, but when the first version was ready to go it was incredibly slow. Like two orders of magnitude slower to render a page. The rendering times were considered normal in Rails-land, but were a real problem at volume. So they spent another 6 weeks putting in a lot of caching while the ops people ordered a bunch more hardware.
  - 9y ago
- textmode 9y ago
  According to this interview the addition of the $.99 charge was to slow down growth. He wanted to be sure they could provide a fast, reliable service and was concerned they might get swamped by an influx of users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVxnKuFarA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVxnKuFarA According to the interview: WhatsApp began as a "status" service. Original iPhone had no background or push notification; user had to start the app to check others' status. When Apple added push notifications to iPhone, they added this to WhatsApp allowing status to be "broadcast". Users in Europe were paying high prices for international SMS. These users saw that broadcast status notications were similar to international SMS, but free. Some of them suggested this to WhatsApp and so WhatApp added messaging. Then the app took off. WhatsApp used FreeBSD, Erlang and SSDs when, according to Koum, everyone in Silicon Valley was using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (LAMP) and HDDs. Compared to others in Silicon Valley, WhatsApp had far fewer servers and employees per user.
  - rurban 9y ago
    > everyone in Silicon Valley was using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (LAMP) and HDDs PHP, not Perl.
submeta 9y ago
I know many who would have paid 10 dollars a month. Some more, some less.
- EastSmith 9y ago
  The network effects would have not worked, because there are many people that can not afford $10 a year. These people would have used an alternative and at the end everyone would have used that alternative (because network effects).
  - pietroglyph 9y ago
    Why not just make it $10/mo or ads?
    - nsp 9y ago
      Because the people who are most valuable to show ads to are also the most likely to be be willing to pay $10/mo to not see ads.
      - Retric 9y ago
        Some are likely far over that threshold. However, I doubt everyone willing to pay 10$/month is worth more on average. Facebook makes $7 per month per user in the US and Canada. So, it's likely fairly close though.
      - lucb1e 9y ago
        But it doesn't matter if you lose money on those people. The $10/month easily carries all costs even if 0.1% of users pay and the rest gains them zero. (At least, back when I did the math in ~2015, when they were probably a bit smaller than they are now.)
        badestrand 9y ago
        Facebook alone makes $23 per user (from US/Canada) per month so it probably should rather be $50 than $10 per month.
product50 9y ago
Yeah. I don't pay for messaging and don't want to see ads. The world will continue to go around since money falls from trees.
- nasredin 9y ago
  Do you pay for cellular data or home internet? You are paying for messaging.
  - product50 9y ago
    Yeah - so why don't you use those messaging apps vs. Whatsapp or Messenger?
  - eecc 9y ago
    Well, messaging is baked in - even multimedia messaging - of mobile technology, but greedy telcos had to charge 0.10€ for each so people just associated them to expensive and jumped as soon as the first viable option emerged.
textmode 9y ago
We are told by Zuckerberg and others at Facebook that users want "relevant" ads. Do users "want" ads? (Assuming they have real choice.) Is it the "irrelevance" of ads that disrupts aesthetics and insults intelligence? Or is it something else about advertising? What assumptions do folks make when they discuss online ads? Do they assume that they know what would happen if they tried to charge user fees for their "service"? Do they assume to know what users would do? (e.g., look for alternatives) Do they assume to know what other software authors would do? (e.g., publish alternatives) What if Facebook thought that users would stop using the "service" if it was not "free"? What if Facebook thought it is more profitable and there is less potential for liability to users (who have paid nothing) if the "service" continues to be "free"?
- wolco 9y ago
  I prefer ads to paided services. I wish there was more honest advertising. I use to be concerned with tracking but the bigger concern is walled gardens.
bobsil1 9y ago
Source: https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads?
manigandham 9y ago
How ironic then that they sold to the very epitome of that example... and only speak out now, long after the $19B acquisition.
- igravious 9y ago
  It's funny how large sums of money will do that. I doubt I'd behave any better if I'm honest about it.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
    It sounds like they've been fighting for users' best interests (and somewhat winning) for the past 4 years. Perhaps they were just naive.
    - igravious 9y ago
      I miss the pre-internet days when all we had to worry about was Wintel's stranglehold on the desktop market and crappy DOS viruses. I thought Linux was the light at the end of the tunnel but instead it was just a false dawn.
      - liberte82 9y ago
        Richard Stallman was a prophet
kashyapc 9y ago
Sure. But did they truly believe all those "assurances" about how they could keep the original WhatsApp values indefinitely while getting acquired for an obscene amount of money?
- submeta 9y ago
  Self-delusion maybe?
  - kashyapc 9y ago
    Definitely in great doses (or maybe not; see nolite's comment). And I don't think it would be far-fetched to say they were willingly blind (by greed) to future repercussions. And now suddenly "wake up", after RSUs / stocks have vested, and cry foul: "Clashes over privacy...Values..." To call it 'disingenuous' is putting it a bit too mildly. Sorry if I'm too cynical on that; somehow I can't just seem to bring myself to assume good spirit in this case.
- nolite 9y ago
  Exactly this. This isn’t delusion or naivety. This guy was smart enough to build an app and gather together 500 million people on it. With $20million per year in revenue, that means it would take over 700 years for Facebook to break even. Any idiot would know that Facebook would change things up to profit from all those users and he knew it too. He just wanted to grab the money (understandstable) but now pretend like he had no clue (not understandable)
evincarofautumn 9y ago
And that quote is immediately followed in the article by—what else?—an ad. I have to wonder if that bit of irony was deliberate.
amelius 9y ago
We should seriously consider to simply outlaw targeted advertising. It would solve a lot of problems.

ggg9990 9y ago

But their WhatsApp business model was not self sufficient. They were charging $1/year which is less than the operating cost of the servers and bandwidth.

saagarjha 9y ago
> They were charging $1/year which is less than the operating cost of the servers and bandwidth Are you sure of this? If they have a billion users, they're earning a billion dollars a year off of this. Considering that they don't need to store messages for an extended period of time, or run analytics, do they really need all that much?
- downandout 9y ago
  Most people weren't actually paying. Apparently, the vast majority of users were granted free lifetime memberships (see comments here [1] and article here [2]). When Facebook acquired it, it only had $10 million in annual revenue [3] against 450 million users. Clearly, most users were jumping on board during times when it was made available for free. [1] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/07/16/whatsapp-goes-free/ http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/07/16/whatsapp-goes-free/ [2] http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/recommendations/whatsapp-messenger-is-currently-free-in-the-app-store/ http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/recommendations/whatsapp-messen... [3] https://www.recode.net/2014/10/28/11632404/facebook-paid-19-billion-for-whatsapp-which-lost-138-million-last-year https://www.recode.net/2014/10/28/11632404/facebook-paid-19-...
  - fasj82 9y ago
    Do you need more than $10M/year for 450M users? As I've said in another comment they barely stored anything server-side and it's known they have a very optimised stack
    - downandout 9y ago
      You do if you’ve been acquired for $19 billion. The founders couldn’t have been naive enough to think that Facebook and its shareholders didn’t have a need to monetize such an enormous investment. Facebook is not a charity, it’s a business.
      - DSingularity 9y ago
        Facebook monetizes Whatsapp by limiting its growth. You can easily think of all the “social” functionality Whatsapp could have added in competition with FB and Messenger.
      - kerng 9y ago
        Facebook paid 19 billion to buy up competition, as WhatsApp was a threat to the Facebook ecosystem.
        unlimit 9y ago
        That is what I am seeing now here in India, folks in my circle barely post anything to facebook now, all pictures, status messages are on WhatsApp now.
      - BurningFrog 9y ago
        If FB pays $19B for every messenger competitor that gets traction, that's a huge incentive to make more of them.
        bryanrasmussen 9y ago
        yeah but now you have to compete with WhatsApp to get that traction, so maybe a hard slog.
- paxy 9y ago
  In 2015, when WhatsApp had ~1B active users, Facebook said that the overall revenue from it was insignificant enough they they were just making it free. I'm pretty sure it wasn't charging the vast majority of users (which is how it got popular in developing countries in the first place).
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    > Facebook said that the overall revenue from it was insignificant enough they they were just making it free Have you considered that Facebook might not be telling the whole truth? "insignificant" compared to what, how much money Facebook makes off of every extra user (who wouldn't want to pay) on their platform? Making it free can only be a profitable move because of what Facebook could do with the data, not because a few million dollars a year is truly "insignificant".
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Articles I read when Facebook bought them said they were losing money. Most reports I just Googled were subscription only or plastered with ads but here's financial sheets: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114000047/exhibit991auditedwhatsappi.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
toomuchtodo 9y ago
Can you provide a citation that pricing wasn’t sustainable? Having been an infra engineer previously, that pricing sounds reasonable for a messaging service based on infra costs.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  WhatsApp supports free encrypted video calling and picture messaging, even for groups. No way that it was covering costs.
  - detaro 9y ago
    It does now, it did not when it was aquired.
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    Why can't it? End-to-end encryption means you don't need to hold on to pictures for lengthy periods of time, and video calling can be done without a centralized service.
  - testvox 9y ago
    Neither of those costs anything extra to run though. Since it's end to end encrypted with no sever backups the images and video can be communicated directly between the clients, WhatsApp just plays matchmaker.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      It could, but that's not how it does, they store the (encrypted) media in their servers so that both phones don't need to be online at the same time, and also to avoid having to upload multiple times when you send to a group. That said, they shouldn't need to keep them around for that long, unlike FB and similar.
  - GFischer 9y ago
    Video and voice calling are peer-to-peer. The only cost is the signalling server. I have a similar service, and it scales pretty well.
bkruse 9y ago
Are you sure? They were adding 1 million users/day http://www.thefactspeak.com/whatsapp-adding-one-million-user-per-day/ http://www.thefactspeak.com/whatsapp-adding-one-million-user... Even at $1/year - their 1.5 billion active users should be an equal amount of revenue. I'd say that's enough to cover the cost of servers and bandwidth.
- product50 9y ago
  But that is it. If all you want is basic messaging then you are probably right. However, if you are trying to build a messaging platform, which is what probably FB intends to do, then it requires more investment. Today, you might think that that is where the problem. All the users really want is basic messaging. However, in 3-5yrs from today, the reality may be very different (see WeChat or LINE in APAC) and WhatsApp maybe a complete misfit in that world. All good products evolve. For something like messaging, if all you provide is a basic product, then you risk yourself being taken over by default platform apps (such as what happened with iMessage on iOS in US). You need stronger lockins and FB is well suited to provide those.
- oblio 9y ago
  If you make messenger users pay anything for it, you’ll lose 80% of them on the spot.
mars4rp 9y ago
at the time of accusation, WhatsApp was running on 16 servers! Erlang is idle for communication, they had like 1 million concurrent user on each server!!!
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  It feels like modern web design practices have grossly skewed people’s estimates of what it costs to deliver a service. Text messages are not fundamentally hardware intensive to deliver - unless you add tracking, “machine learning”, ad delivery, and mountains of JS for serving the app itself dynamically.
  - bluedino 9y ago
    Or write the service in Ruby
    - wpietri 9y ago
      I adore Ruby, but I think that's fair. Twitter's failwhale-heavy Ruby experience is a good example. Ruby and especially Rails are good examples of trading hardware for programmer convenience. This is absolutely great when you're banging out an in-house app for 100 people, and there's no problem spending $1 per user-month on hardware. But Twitter's revenue is only $0.60 per user-month, and they need to spend on things besides severs. There is a reason that they needed to switch away from Ruby to a much more complicated architecture: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... I also saw some people go the other direction. They had a Java app for serving a high-volume website. But the developers had a rewrite itch, and the execs were afraid they couldn't get acquired without a more hip technology stack. They even hired a fancy consulting firm to help, but when the first version was ready to go it was incredibly slow. Like two orders of magnitude slower to render a page. The rendering times were considered normal in Rails-land, but were a real problem at volume. So they spent another 6 weeks putting in a lot of caching while the ops people ordered a bunch more hardware.
- 9y ago
textmode 9y ago
According to this interview the addition of the $.99 charge was to slow down growth. He wanted to be sure they could provide a fast, reliable service and was concerned they might get swamped by an influx of users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVxnKuFarA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVxnKuFarA According to the interview: WhatsApp began as a "status" service. Original iPhone had no background or push notification; user had to start the app to check others' status. When Apple added push notifications to iPhone, they added this to WhatsApp allowing status to be "broadcast". Users in Europe were paying high prices for international SMS. These users saw that broadcast status notications were similar to international SMS, but free. Some of them suggested this to WhatsApp and so WhatApp added messaging. Then the app took off. WhatsApp used FreeBSD, Erlang and SSDs when, according to Koum, everyone in Silicon Valley was using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (LAMP) and HDDs. Compared to others in Silicon Valley, WhatsApp had far fewer servers and employees per user.
- rurban 9y ago
  > everyone in Silicon Valley was using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (LAMP) and HDDs PHP, not Perl.

submeta 9y ago

I know many who would have paid 10 dollars a month. Some more, some less.

EastSmith 9y ago
The network effects would have not worked, because there are many people that can not afford $10 a year. These people would have used an alternative and at the end everyone would have used that alternative (because network effects).
- pietroglyph 9y ago
  Why not just make it $10/mo or ads?
  - nsp 9y ago
    Because the people who are most valuable to show ads to are also the most likely to be be willing to pay $10/mo to not see ads.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Some are likely far over that threshold. However, I doubt everyone willing to pay 10$/month is worth more on average. Facebook makes $7 per month per user in the US and Canada. So, it's likely fairly close though.
    - lucb1e 9y ago
      But it doesn't matter if you lose money on those people. The $10/month easily carries all costs even if 0.1% of users pay and the rest gains them zero. (At least, back when I did the math in ~2015, when they were probably a bit smaller than they are now.)
      - badestrand 9y ago
        Facebook alone makes $23 per user (from US/Canada) per month so it probably should rather be $50 than $10 per month.

product50 9y ago

Yeah. I don't pay for messaging and don't want to see ads. The world will continue to go around since money falls from trees.

nasredin 9y ago
Do you pay for cellular data or home internet? You are paying for messaging.
- product50 9y ago
  Yeah - so why don't you use those messaging apps vs. Whatsapp or Messenger?
- eecc 9y ago
  Well, messaging is baked in - even multimedia messaging - of mobile technology, but greedy telcos had to charge 0.10€ for each so people just associated them to expensive and jumped as soon as the first viable option emerged.

textmode 9y ago

We are told by Zuckerberg and others at Facebook that users want "relevant" ads. Do users "want" ads? (Assuming they have real choice.) Is it the "irrelevance" of ads that disrupts aesthetics and insults intelligence? Or is it something else about advertising? What assumptions do folks make when they discuss online ads? Do they assume that they know what would happen if they tried to charge user fees for their "service"? Do they assume to know what users would do? (e.g., look for alternatives) Do they assume to know what other software authors would do? (e.g., publish alternatives) What if Facebook thought that users would stop using the "service" if it was not "free"? What if Facebook thought it is more profitable and there is less potential for liability to users (who have paid nothing) if the "service" continues to be "free"?

wolco 9y ago
I prefer ads to paided services. I wish there was more honest advertising. I use to be concerned with tracking but the bigger concern is walled gardens.

bobsil1 9y ago

Source: https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads?

manigandham 9y ago

How ironic then that they sold to the very epitome of that example... and only speak out now, long after the $19B acquisition.

igravious 9y ago
It's funny how large sums of money will do that. I doubt I'd behave any better if I'm honest about it.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  It sounds like they've been fighting for users' best interests (and somewhat winning) for the past 4 years. Perhaps they were just naive.
  - igravious 9y ago
    I miss the pre-internet days when all we had to worry about was Wintel's stranglehold on the desktop market and crappy DOS viruses. I thought Linux was the light at the end of the tunnel but instead it was just a false dawn.
    - liberte82 9y ago
      Richard Stallman was a prophet

kashyapc 9y ago

Sure. But did they truly believe all those "assurances" about how they could keep the original WhatsApp values indefinitely while getting acquired for an obscene amount of money?

submeta 9y ago
Self-delusion maybe?
- kashyapc 9y ago
  Definitely in great doses (or maybe not; see nolite's comment). And I don't think it would be far-fetched to say they were willingly blind (by greed) to future repercussions. And now suddenly "wake up", after RSUs / stocks have vested, and cry foul: "Clashes over privacy...Values..." To call it 'disingenuous' is putting it a bit too mildly. Sorry if I'm too cynical on that; somehow I can't just seem to bring myself to assume good spirit in this case.
nolite 9y ago
Exactly this. This isn’t delusion or naivety. This guy was smart enough to build an app and gather together 500 million people on it. With $20million per year in revenue, that means it would take over 700 years for Facebook to break even. Any idiot would know that Facebook would change things up to profit from all those users and he knew it too. He just wanted to grab the money (understandstable) but now pretend like he had no clue (not understandable)

evincarofautumn 9y ago

And that quote is immediately followed in the article by—what else?—an ad. I have to wonder if that bit of irony was deliberate.

amelius 9y ago

We should seriously consider to simply outlaw targeted advertising. It would solve a lot of problems.