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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
by 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 agoFacebook 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 agoFacebook paid 19 billion to buy up competition, as WhatsApp was a threat to the Facebook ecosystem.
- unlimit 9y agoThat 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 agoIf FB pays $19B for every messenger competitor that gets traction, that's a huge incentive to make more of them.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoyeah but now you have to compete with WhatsApp to get that traction, so maybe a hard slog.
- sjclemmy 9y agoAnd if FB shut down WhatsApp, users will be looking to go elsewhere, and probably not FB Messenger.
- ksaxena 9y agoThere are network effects at play; so once a messenger has locked-in most users, it's extremely hard for newcomers to gain sustainable traction.