28 ms·

Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

244 points by ericzawo 8y ago

coldtea 8y ago
Well, too late, they've bought it now. WhatsApp is just Facebook itself.
mariocesar 8y ago
Is there a link without a paywall ?
- tchen 8y ago
  https://outline.com/8C7BNH https://outline.com/8C7BNH
paxys 8y ago
Everyone knew this day would come the moment they announced the purchase
edgarvaldes 8y ago
"Messaging service WhatsApp, which has a user base of roughly 1.5 billion, is set to start showing ads in its Status feature next year" Well, monetize through ads is something expected in any free platform that does not belong to a non-profit organization. It's just a matter of time and implementation. Here in Mexico WhatsApp is huge, even as a default B2C channel for a lot of small businesses.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Well, monetize through ads is something expected in any free platform that does not belong to a non-profit organization. You could also, you know, charge money for the service.
bassman9000 8y ago
Aside from Signal and Telegram, is there any worthy alternative?
- jakebasile 8y ago
  I've just defaulted back to iMessage for pretty much everything - not an ideal option if you don't mostly talk to people with Apple devices though.
  - tajen 8y ago
    What about groupchat?
    - brisance 8y ago
      iOS supports group chat. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724
  - bassman9000 8y ago
    Thanks, but we have a mixed ecosystem, and Apple vendor lock-in is not an option. Plus, their current pro-privacy stance seems phony.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      Phony in what way?
      - bassman9000 8y ago
        In the way that's not the result of a real pro-privacy strategy, but a unintended side effect of losing the voice assistant battle. Because Siri was getting behind, they now market themselves, directly or not, as privacy friendly. IMHO, they haven't yet found a way to market those vast amounts of tracking information without causing another scandal.
moe_32 8y ago
Time to disable Whatsapp. It keeps draining my battery as it is.
danirod 8y ago
Remember when WhatsApp required a subscription? One of the first changes made by Facebook after purchasing WhatsApp was to make it available for free. And now they're complaining they can't milk it enough? Oh dear. I know that a percentage of WhatsApp users would stop using the app if they started requiring a payment again –because apparently paying $1 per year for using an application on your $999 phone is outrageous, but I wonder why can't they just make it an option again as an alternative to ads.
- h1srf 8y ago
  Was it a subscription? I thought it was $1 to purchase(iOS).
  - enitihas 8y ago
    I think they had turned to subscription instead of one off purchase after some time.
  - mcjiggerlog 8y ago
    $1 per year
    - ksec 8y ago
      it was free for android and $1 for iOS users. subscription came way later..
      - mcjiggerlog 8y ago
        All I know was I had Android and it was £0.99 per year, first year free. I've been using since 2009.
  - tigershark 8y ago
    on iOS was purchase, on android was subscription, after a while I think they may have switched to subscription on iOS for the people that didn't buy it.
  - 8y ago
noncoml 8y ago
Almost everybody I know has at least 2 messaging apps installed on their phone. What's to stop people start migrating to Signal/Telegram/Viber/Keybase/etc.. once WhatsApp starts displaying ads?
- wilsonchaney 8y ago
  Network effect. My anecdote - out of, say, 50 people I know, two have Telegram. The rest use a combination of iMessage, Facebook messenger, and WhatsApp. 22yo male.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Telegram here has the reputation of a chat app you might use to hide naughty online liaisons from your wife. Like something indexed to an alternative identity. (So: like what the internet used to be like in olden times. But still.)
    - pmlnr 8y ago
      Huh. I used it with my wife - she was the only one willing to give it a try.
    - smoovb 8y ago
      Telegram is a hands-down better experience than whats app. I think it’s the first one to give the ability to edit messages after you sent them.
- enitihas 8y ago
  I think you are an outlier in that regard. Almost nobody I know is using any other messaging app instead of WhatsApp, and I just graduated out of University so my social circle consists of a lot of fresh engineering grads. It is hard for me to convince even my batchmates to install signal. I think people don't want to install anything else as none of their contacts are on any other platform.
  - 8y ago
neonate 8y ago
http://archive.is/nRt3x http://archive.is/nRt3x
- kough 8y ago
  Thank you.
- ernsheong 8y ago
  https://app.pagedash.com/p/ba7ed211-4563-4a5b-b410-b084f7e5a9df/7lNftPCeupNLZamzYgzb https://app.pagedash.com/p/ba7ed211-4563-4a5b-b410-b084f7e5a...
dlojudice 8y ago
Is monetizing through ads the only way to go? Is FB org trapped on its modus operandis (innovator's dilemma)? What about payments (charging a small fee for transactions) on their platform? The number of people already making business transactions on WhatsApp platform is huge, specially in Brazil [1]. A big bank in Brazil has already tried to grab this market by creating a keyboard with wire transfer integration [2]. This model is very similar to what WeChat has done in China. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatsapp-is-the-main-digital-channel-for-brazilian-smes/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatsapp-is-the-main-digital-c... [2] https://medium.com/@leandroscosta/bank-ita%C3%BA-launch-a-keyboard-to-keep-you-in-the-conversation-while-you-transfer-your-money-34b6828d8edb https://medium.com/@leandroscosta/bank-ita%C3%BA-launch-a-ke...
- xkjkls 8y ago
  Square, a company with many years headstart, trades at a high multiple, and has many more integration points into commerce than WhatsApp does currently, trades at a market cap of $27 billion. Given that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, trying a low probability strategy of trying to compete for market share where the best case scenario is $27 billion in value seems foolish.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Square and Whatsapp are basically not comparable business entities.
    - xkjkls 8y ago
      If WhatsApp decided to move to payments, it is the closest analog.
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        No, square is fundamentally geared towards long-tail consumer retail, not peer-to-peer payments, and it's very credit card oriented. They still would not even be comparable.
eoincathal 8y ago
I am more than happy to pay for a subscription to Whatsapp. I have a scattered family and it's a great way for us to stay in touch. As one of the more technically-minded family members, switching to a different service does not bother me but we've got 3 generations on our Whatsapp family groups and its ease of use and familiarity gives it inertia. Not bothered by the idea of a relatively affluent westerner (me) paying more than those in less well off parts - already do for a lot of goods and services. Facebook's data hoover and business model aside, are subscriptions, in themselves, unworkable for Whatsapp?
- xkjkls 8y ago
  Pay what though? $1 a year? $10 a year? $100? They have to find a way to justify the $19 billion purchase price. Almost all charging schemes are only going to get certain fraction of people to convert, and they need to be finding ways to reach similar $20 per user revenue numbers like the Facebook main app has in the US.
nell 8y ago
I wonder if that is why they opened up their API to Twilio. Twilio can now pay Whatsapp whatever it has to pay the carriers to send/receive SMS.
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  Given how little Twilio charges per messsage, this can not be a serious money maker for Whatsapp.
  - krn 8y ago
    I wouldn't call Twilio charges per message in Germany ($0.0850) or in Brazil ($0.0570) "little". WhatsApp is much bigger in these markets than in the US.
  - nell 8y ago
    While the revenue from Twilio itself is insignificant at Facebook scale, it could be a sign that they will open up more to partnerships around the worlds without having to include advertising.
rbreve 8y ago
They should try to apply the fortnite strategy, and charge for cosmetic features such as premium emoticons, and profile photos
- xkjkls 8y ago
  Engagement is not nearly the same. There are 1.5 billion WhatsApp users, but how many would actually convert. I'd find it hard to see numbers higher than the low single digits.
  - TillE 8y ago
    Apple and third-parties have obviously seen value in selling those stickers and crap. I think there actually would be a decent market for premium emoji. It's not too difficult to imagine all sorts of fun bonus features in a chat app.
    - xkjkls 8y ago
      For whom is that the primary business model, instead of an addition though?
      - egypturnash 8y ago
        IRC, Line makes absolute pots of money off of stickers, merch of the characters they've made for those stickers, and assorted other things. Wish I could find the article I read on that a while back.
        xkjkls 8y ago
        http://vator.tv/news/2017-01-13-how-does-line-make-money http://vator.tv/news/2017-01-13-how-does-line-make-money That seems to indicate that 22% of Line's revenue was from stickers, which was lower than the highest section: advertising. Those are 2017 numbers, and I'd suspect that advertising makes up an even bigger section now.
      - 8y ago
russellbeattie 8y ago
Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that's nothing to sneeze at. It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs, so they can then turn around and squeeze their locked in users for every dime possible.
- SamUK96 8y ago
  How else is someone with an MBA going to make their qualification look like it means something? It's similar to marketing in many large companies for example, anyone will tell you that most of what marketing does benefits precisely no-one. Users get pissed off about adtech et al - but those "extra 5000 clicks per month!" sound really good in a meeting and without any context regarding sales and PR, etc...
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  Glossing over the fact that they probably wouldn't have all of those 1.5 billion users if it had stayed a paid service. Even at $1, having to pay money pushes people off to other free platforms.
  - pmlnr 8y ago
    So? It would still be profitable. Not everyone has to use the same thing.
    - sushid 8y ago
      Sure but it will start to erode its market share as other companies offer similar but free products. And a mobile messaging company relies on the network effect to stay relevant and popular.
    - pmontra 8y ago
      One of their free competitors would have grown to 1.5 billion users and whatsapp wouldn't be able to charge money for the same product. They would have had to pivot to something people would pay for or close or sell for a much smaller amount. They could try charging $1 per year now and see what happens. Probably a flood mainly to Facebook Messenger and in part to other apps.
mtgx 8y ago
Relevant post from earlier this year: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whatsapp-founder-plans-to-leave-after-broad-clashes-with-parent-facebook/2018/04/30/49448dd2-4ca9-11e8-84a0-458a1aa9ac0a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whatsapp-fou...
navidfarhadi 8y ago
They could always try charging 1 USD/year for the service /s
kough 8y ago
As long as they don't start showing ads in my contact / messages list, that's fine. As soon as that starts to happen I'm gone -- that's why I left FB Messenger. Or at least give me some way to pay to turn that off.
- bikamonki 8y ago
  That is exactly what they will do. The status tab will probable show ads first, then the chats tab. Also, expect bulk messaging from business.
caioariede 8y ago
I'd be happy to pay for premium feature, like extra privacy controls and no ads edit: clarifying, I'd love to be able to not let people know when I'm online
- sanlyx 8y ago
  AFAIK You can hide your online status/last seen for the price of not being able to see other people's
walterbell 8y ago
From https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/technology/whatsapp-facebook-jan-koum.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/technology/whatsapp-fa... "Mr. Koum had grown increasingly concerned about Facebook’s position on user data in recent years. Mr. Koum was perturbed by the amount of information that Facebook collected on people and had wanted stronger protections for that data ... he felt the company’s board simply paid lip service to privacy and security concerns he raised ... Mr. Koum was tired from fighting back against pressure from the board throughout 2017 to allow advertisements on WhatsApp ... There had been a certain level of pride within WhatsApp’s team over the dedication to privacy and the departure of their co-founder had left many wondering whether Facebook would now open WhatsApp to tracking user data and, eventually, to ads on its service." https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/whatsapp-founders-may-have-left-1-3-billion-behind-in-their-facebook-breakup/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/wh... "WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton reportedly left $1.3 billion behind by leaving Facebook ... The major divide was over monetizing the messaging app, which has 1.5 billion users. Koum and Acton had been resistant to adopting Facebook's widely lucrative targeted advertising model."
dep_b 8y ago
I don't remember any new feature I liked since Facebook took over. Perhaps some stuff in the group chats that I liked but that's it. So if there's some kind of momentum for another messaging app I'll jump ship early.
- ramsr 8y ago
  In India, they recently launched payments within Whatsapp which is a major breakthrough IMO.
ilovecaching 8y ago
TBH I prefer ads. As a small business owner, online ads have allowed me to grow my extremely niche business without spending a large bundle of funding, and I'm sure it's helped countless more small businesses compete against the big box stores that can afford to do their own advertising. From a user perspective, the product can be given out for free, which for social media is a must, unless we want to start seeing classest messaging platforms excluding people in countries who can't even afford 1 dollar or make digital payments. If I was going to let ads bother me I'd be much more upset about someone owning my search engine, phone, email, personal documents, cloud storage, etc... who could cross references those sources to build an accurate picture of my identity, rather than someone just owning my social media accounts where I'm just about as fake as necessary to make my grandma think I'm still going to church.
salex89 8y ago
There is nothing I would like more than Facebook to sell WhatsApp, so I'm at least a bit more out of their claws or, alternately, for WhatsApp to be ruined and all my friends go to some other messaging app. I've been a long user of WA and really love it, but I'm not a fan of FB, although I do have an account, but rarely use it for messaging.
- hw 8y ago
  I can't agree more here. So far Whatsapp and Instagram hasn't been interfered with too much by Facebook, aside from FB completely turning off Instagram API and forcing everyone to upgrade to the IG Graph API way ahead of the deprecation schedule. API support for Instagram DMs is also something that's been long requested for, but ever since FB bought Instagram, there hasn't been any work on the API side. Sometimes I wonder if Instagram would have been better off as its own platform free from the crutches of Facebook. While I'm hoping that it'll stay that way, it's only a matter of time before core Facebook starts to go the way of Myspace and they realize that IG/Whatsapp is the future.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
scblock 8y ago
Next up: nonlinear timeline!
fraudsyndrome 8y ago
If they want to charge for it they better make it easier than it is currently to migrate over chats from iOS to Android and vice versa. iOS to Android was okay, still had to pay ~$10 for it. Going from Android to iOS was very difficult so I lost a lot of my chats.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Entangled 8y ago
Make it a money remmitance platform and allow one billion people to send a trillion dollars a year charging just one percent in fees (ten billions in revenue) while providing merchants with extra apps and features for a premium. A couple of days ago I was ordering a pizza by phone and they told me they had a whatsapp channel to take orders so I thought paying using whatsapp would be perfect. No need for annoying ads or invasive data collection.
- brisance 8y ago
  > No need for annoying ads or invasive data collection. But they've already built infrastructure to do all this surveillance, the incremental cost is minimal. It's just too tempting to pass up on the low-hanging fruit.
- pimmen 8y ago
  Not a bad idea, but might be hard to execute. Finance is often pretty tightly regulated because you could use WhatsApp to launder money, especially when the communication is end-to-end encrypted. So it's not impossible, but it would be a challenge on pretty uncharted territory. But hell, Nintendo pivoted from simple toys to video games successfully so this could work it pretty well.
- pranau 8y ago
  Actually, WhatsApp does support payments via the UPI framework in India. It hasn't caught up among businesses but it is gaining popularity among people to transfer cash from one person to another.
augbog 8y ago
I remember interviewing WhatsApp once. First thing I asked was how much does Facebook determine what comes down in terms of priority. The reply was "There might be some things but we are our own entity. It really hasn't affected us at all!" Few weeks later it was announced WhatsApp CEO quits due to privacy disagreements. lol
mnl 8y ago
They had a business model: you provide a service to your customers and your customers pay for it. As the service is awesome, customers stay. That's why for instance in Spain, it has been the de facto messaging standard for 7-8 years. People paid for it if they had to, even for the 3-year pack. They use WhatsApp for everything, it literally has replaced calls. If there are ads now this might change, as that will alienate everybody. They might consider Telegram (that'd be my bet). WhatsApp is considered standard functionality of your phone here, you'd change your mobile provider if they start playing ads in the middle of a call.
gonvaled 8y ago
I would pay for some extra features. From the top of my head: - several accounts (phone numbers) managed in a single WhatsApp installation - auto-forward messages from one number to another - integration with other services (gmail, gdrive, ...) - api, to scratch my itches
kenrick95 8y ago
Related blog post from WhatsApp: https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000648/Growing-our-Tools-for-Business https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000648/Growing-our-Tools-for-Bus...
voltagex_ 8y ago
Shit, I just convinced my parents to use WhatsApp instead of SMS. Time to start looking for an alternative. What's Telegram's business model? (yes, a good UI is a requirement and no, Signal isn't there yet).
- smoovb 8y ago
  Telegram just raising $1.7B in a crypto sale, which means it is the largest chat app not owned by a major corp or government. Plus familiar interface to Whatsapp, they won't even know you switched them.
  - MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
    If you are ok with your traffic routed being to russia (and recently, Iran), not having default encryption on 1on1 chats and no encryption whatsoever on group chats - sure, choose Telegram. Not even counting the ICO, which is suspect in itself.
    - lloeki 8y ago
      > If you are ok with your traffic routed being to russia (and recently, Iran) Where does that come from? Because from what I gather it's precisely the opposite: Telegram users in Russia and Iran are leveraging proxies (sometimes run by volunteers) to get around their nations filtering. When you're using someone else's platform it all comes down to trust, and I'd rather trust an expat Russian that left his home country on grounds of being coerced into handing over user private information to his then nation's surveillance strike force and refused to bow down on that same nation's attempt to subvert his new platform then blocking half of the Internet's servers, than an app claiming to be end-to-end encrypted under the helm of a company that has time and time again been caught red-handed invading everyone's privacy and lying barefaced about it and whose monetisation and privacy strategy is denounced by the very founders of said chat app to the point of dropping everything on the floor and leaving said company.
      - MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
blocked_again 8y ago
Only if big companies stop trying to make the world a better place and leave companies like WhatsApp alone. WhatsApp was a small company making good enough money by respecting it's users. Then Facebook had to come and destroy everything isn't?
fiatjaf 8y ago
Great news! Now this madness will stop. Suffer, WhatsApp users!
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244 points by ericzawo 8y ago

coldtea 8y ago

Well, too late, they've bought it now. WhatsApp is just Facebook itself.

mariocesar 8y ago

Is there a link without a paywall ?

tchen 8y ago
https://outline.com/8C7BNH https://outline.com/8C7BNH

paxys 8y ago

Everyone knew this day would come the moment they announced the purchase

edgarvaldes 8y ago

"Messaging service WhatsApp, which has a user base of roughly 1.5 billion, is set to start showing ads in its Status feature next year" Well, monetize through ads is something expected in any free platform that does not belong to a non-profit organization. It's just a matter of time and implementation. Here in Mexico WhatsApp is huge, even as a default B2C channel for a lot of small businesses.

saagarjha 8y ago
> Well, monetize through ads is something expected in any free platform that does not belong to a non-profit organization. You could also, you know, charge money for the service.

bassman9000 8y ago

Aside from Signal and Telegram, is there any worthy alternative?

jakebasile 8y ago
I've just defaulted back to iMessage for pretty much everything - not an ideal option if you don't mostly talk to people with Apple devices though.
- tajen 8y ago
  What about groupchat?
  - brisance 8y ago
    iOS supports group chat. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724
- bassman9000 8y ago
  Thanks, but we have a mixed ecosystem, and Apple vendor lock-in is not an option. Plus, their current pro-privacy stance seems phony.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Phony in what way?
    - bassman9000 8y ago
      In the way that's not the result of a real pro-privacy strategy, but a unintended side effect of losing the voice assistant battle. Because Siri was getting behind, they now market themselves, directly or not, as privacy friendly. IMHO, they haven't yet found a way to market those vast amounts of tracking information without causing another scandal.

moe_32 8y ago

Time to disable Whatsapp. It keeps draining my battery as it is.

danirod 8y ago

Remember when WhatsApp required a subscription? One of the first changes made by Facebook after purchasing WhatsApp was to make it available for free. And now they're complaining they can't milk it enough? Oh dear. I know that a percentage of WhatsApp users would stop using the app if they started requiring a payment again –because apparently paying $1 per year for using an application on your $999 phone is outrageous, but I wonder why can't they just make it an option again as an alternative to ads.

h1srf 8y ago
Was it a subscription? I thought it was $1 to purchase(iOS).
- enitihas 8y ago
  I think they had turned to subscription instead of one off purchase after some time.
- mcjiggerlog 8y ago
  $1 per year
  - ksec 8y ago
    it was free for android and $1 for iOS users. subscription came way later..
    - mcjiggerlog 8y ago
      All I know was I had Android and it was £0.99 per year, first year free. I've been using since 2009.
- tigershark 8y ago
  on iOS was purchase, on android was subscription, after a while I think they may have switched to subscription on iOS for the people that didn't buy it.
- 8y ago

noncoml 8y ago

Almost everybody I know has at least 2 messaging apps installed on their phone. What's to stop people start migrating to Signal/Telegram/Viber/Keybase/etc.. once WhatsApp starts displaying ads?

wilsonchaney 8y ago
Network effect. My anecdote - out of, say, 50 people I know, two have Telegram. The rest use a combination of iMessage, Facebook messenger, and WhatsApp. 22yo male.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Telegram here has the reputation of a chat app you might use to hide naughty online liaisons from your wife. Like something indexed to an alternative identity. (So: like what the internet used to be like in olden times. But still.)
  - pmlnr 8y ago
    Huh. I used it with my wife - she was the only one willing to give it a try.
  - smoovb 8y ago
    Telegram is a hands-down better experience than whats app. I think it’s the first one to give the ability to edit messages after you sent them.
enitihas 8y ago
I think you are an outlier in that regard. Almost nobody I know is using any other messaging app instead of WhatsApp, and I just graduated out of University so my social circle consists of a lot of fresh engineering grads. It is hard for me to convince even my batchmates to install signal. I think people don't want to install anything else as none of their contacts are on any other platform.
- 8y ago

neonate 8y ago

http://archive.is/nRt3x http://archive.is/nRt3x

kough 8y ago
Thank you.
ernsheong 8y ago
https://app.pagedash.com/p/ba7ed211-4563-4a5b-b410-b084f7e5a9df/7lNftPCeupNLZamzYgzb https://app.pagedash.com/p/ba7ed211-4563-4a5b-b410-b084f7e5a...

dlojudice 8y ago

Is monetizing through ads the only way to go? Is FB org trapped on its modus operandis (innovator's dilemma)? What about payments (charging a small fee for transactions) on their platform? The number of people already making business transactions on WhatsApp platform is huge, specially in Brazil [1]. A big bank in Brazil has already tried to grab this market by creating a keyboard with wire transfer integration [2]. This model is very similar to what WeChat has done in China. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatsapp-is-the-main-digital-channel-for-brazilian-smes/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatsapp-is-the-main-digital-c... [2] https://medium.com/@leandroscosta/bank-ita%C3%BA-launch-a-keyboard-to-keep-you-in-the-conversation-while-you-transfer-your-money-34b6828d8edb https://medium.com/@leandroscosta/bank-ita%C3%BA-launch-a-ke...

xkjkls 8y ago
Square, a company with many years headstart, trades at a high multiple, and has many more integration points into commerce than WhatsApp does currently, trades at a market cap of $27 billion. Given that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, trying a low probability strategy of trying to compete for market share where the best case scenario is $27 billion in value seems foolish.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Square and Whatsapp are basically not comparable business entities.
  - xkjkls 8y ago
    If WhatsApp decided to move to payments, it is the closest analog.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      No, square is fundamentally geared towards long-tail consumer retail, not peer-to-peer payments, and it's very credit card oriented. They still would not even be comparable.

eoincathal 8y ago

I am more than happy to pay for a subscription to Whatsapp. I have a scattered family and it's a great way for us to stay in touch. As one of the more technically-minded family members, switching to a different service does not bother me but we've got 3 generations on our Whatsapp family groups and its ease of use and familiarity gives it inertia. Not bothered by the idea of a relatively affluent westerner (me) paying more than those in less well off parts - already do for a lot of goods and services. Facebook's data hoover and business model aside, are subscriptions, in themselves, unworkable for Whatsapp?

xkjkls 8y ago
Pay what though? $1 a year? $10 a year? $100? They have to find a way to justify the $19 billion purchase price. Almost all charging schemes are only going to get certain fraction of people to convert, and they need to be finding ways to reach similar $20 per user revenue numbers like the Facebook main app has in the US.

nell 8y ago

I wonder if that is why they opened up their API to Twilio. Twilio can now pay Whatsapp whatever it has to pay the carriers to send/receive SMS.

Ensorceled 8y ago
Given how little Twilio charges per messsage, this can not be a serious money maker for Whatsapp.
- krn 8y ago
  I wouldn't call Twilio charges per message in Germany ($0.0850) or in Brazil ($0.0570) "little". WhatsApp is much bigger in these markets than in the US.
- nell 8y ago
  While the revenue from Twilio itself is insignificant at Facebook scale, it could be a sign that they will open up more to partnerships around the worlds without having to include advertising.

rbreve 8y ago

They should try to apply the fortnite strategy, and charge for cosmetic features such as premium emoticons, and profile photos

xkjkls 8y ago
Engagement is not nearly the same. There are 1.5 billion WhatsApp users, but how many would actually convert. I'd find it hard to see numbers higher than the low single digits.
- TillE 8y ago
  Apple and third-parties have obviously seen value in selling those stickers and crap. I think there actually would be a decent market for premium emoji. It's not too difficult to imagine all sorts of fun bonus features in a chat app.
  - xkjkls 8y ago
    For whom is that the primary business model, instead of an addition though?
    - egypturnash 8y ago
      IRC, Line makes absolute pots of money off of stickers, merch of the characters they've made for those stickers, and assorted other things. Wish I could find the article I read on that a while back.
      - xkjkls 8y ago
        http://vator.tv/news/2017-01-13-how-does-line-make-money http://vator.tv/news/2017-01-13-how-does-line-make-money That seems to indicate that 22% of Line's revenue was from stickers, which was lower than the highest section: advertising. Those are 2017 numbers, and I'd suspect that advertising makes up an even bigger section now.
    - 8y ago

russellbeattie 8y ago

Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that's nothing to sneeze at. It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs, so they can then turn around and squeeze their locked in users for every dime possible.

SamUK96 8y ago
How else is someone with an MBA going to make their qualification look like it means something? It's similar to marketing in many large companies for example, anyone will tell you that most of what marketing does benefits precisely no-one. Users get pissed off about adtech et al - but those "extra 5000 clicks per month!" sound really good in a meeting and without any context regarding sales and PR, etc...
wlesieutre 8y ago
Glossing over the fact that they probably wouldn't have all of those 1.5 billion users if it had stayed a paid service. Even at $1, having to pay money pushes people off to other free platforms.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  So? It would still be profitable. Not everyone has to use the same thing.
  - sushid 8y ago
    Sure but it will start to erode its market share as other companies offer similar but free products. And a mobile messaging company relies on the network effect to stay relevant and popular.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    One of their free competitors would have grown to 1.5 billion users and whatsapp wouldn't be able to charge money for the same product. They would have had to pivot to something people would pay for or close or sell for a much smaller amount. They could try charging $1 per year now and see what happens. Probably a flood mainly to Facebook Messenger and in part to other apps.

mtgx 8y ago

Relevant post from earlier this year: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whatsapp-founder-plans-to-leave-after-broad-clashes-with-parent-facebook/2018/04/30/49448dd2-4ca9-11e8-84a0-458a1aa9ac0a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whatsapp-fou...

navidfarhadi 8y ago

They could always try charging 1 USD/year for the service /s

kough 8y ago

As long as they don't start showing ads in my contact / messages list, that's fine. As soon as that starts to happen I'm gone -- that's why I left FB Messenger. Or at least give me some way to pay to turn that off.

bikamonki 8y ago
That is exactly what they will do. The status tab will probable show ads first, then the chats tab. Also, expect bulk messaging from business.

caioariede 8y ago

I'd be happy to pay for premium feature, like extra privacy controls and no ads edit: clarifying, I'd love to be able to not let people know when I'm online

sanlyx 8y ago
AFAIK You can hide your online status/last seen for the price of not being able to see other people's

walterbell 8y ago

From https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/technology/whatsapp-facebook-jan-koum.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/technology/whatsapp-fa... "Mr. Koum had grown increasingly concerned about Facebook’s position on user data in recent years. Mr. Koum was perturbed by the amount of information that Facebook collected on people and had wanted stronger protections for that data ... he felt the company’s board simply paid lip service to privacy and security concerns he raised ... Mr. Koum was tired from fighting back against pressure from the board throughout 2017 to allow advertisements on WhatsApp ... There had been a certain level of pride within WhatsApp’s team over the dedication to privacy and the departure of their co-founder had left many wondering whether Facebook would now open WhatsApp to tracking user data and, eventually, to ads on its service." https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/whatsapp-founders-may-have-left-1-3-billion-behind-in-their-facebook-breakup/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/wh... "WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton reportedly left $1.3 billion behind by leaving Facebook ... The major divide was over monetizing the messaging app, which has 1.5 billion users. Koum and Acton had been resistant to adopting Facebook's widely lucrative targeted advertising model."

dep_b 8y ago

I don't remember any new feature I liked since Facebook took over. Perhaps some stuff in the group chats that I liked but that's it. So if there's some kind of momentum for another messaging app I'll jump ship early.

ramsr 8y ago
In India, they recently launched payments within Whatsapp which is a major breakthrough IMO.

ilovecaching 8y ago

TBH I prefer ads. As a small business owner, online ads have allowed me to grow my extremely niche business without spending a large bundle of funding, and I'm sure it's helped countless more small businesses compete against the big box stores that can afford to do their own advertising. From a user perspective, the product can be given out for free, which for social media is a must, unless we want to start seeing classest messaging platforms excluding people in countries who can't even afford 1 dollar or make digital payments. If I was going to let ads bother me I'd be much more upset about someone owning my search engine, phone, email, personal documents, cloud storage, etc... who could cross references those sources to build an accurate picture of my identity, rather than someone just owning my social media accounts where I'm just about as fake as necessary to make my grandma think I'm still going to church.

salex89 8y ago

There is nothing I would like more than Facebook to sell WhatsApp, so I'm at least a bit more out of their claws or, alternately, for WhatsApp to be ruined and all my friends go to some other messaging app. I've been a long user of WA and really love it, but I'm not a fan of FB, although I do have an account, but rarely use it for messaging.

hw 8y ago
I can't agree more here. So far Whatsapp and Instagram hasn't been interfered with too much by Facebook, aside from FB completely turning off Instagram API and forcing everyone to upgrade to the IG Graph API way ahead of the deprecation schedule. API support for Instagram DMs is also something that's been long requested for, but ever since FB bought Instagram, there hasn't been any work on the API side. Sometimes I wonder if Instagram would have been better off as its own platform free from the crutches of Facebook. While I'm hoping that it'll stay that way, it's only a matter of time before core Facebook starts to go the way of Myspace and they realize that IG/Whatsapp is the future.
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scblock 8y ago

Next up: nonlinear timeline!

fraudsyndrome 8y ago

If they want to charge for it they better make it easier than it is currently to migrate over chats from iOS to Android and vice versa. iOS to Android was okay, still had to pay ~$10 for it. Going from Android to iOS was very difficult so I lost a lot of my chats.

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Entangled 8y ago

Make it a money remmitance platform and allow one billion people to send a trillion dollars a year charging just one percent in fees (ten billions in revenue) while providing merchants with extra apps and features for a premium. A couple of days ago I was ordering a pizza by phone and they told me they had a whatsapp channel to take orders so I thought paying using whatsapp would be perfect. No need for annoying ads or invasive data collection.

brisance 8y ago
> No need for annoying ads or invasive data collection. But they've already built infrastructure to do all this surveillance, the incremental cost is minimal. It's just too tempting to pass up on the low-hanging fruit.
pimmen 8y ago
Not a bad idea, but might be hard to execute. Finance is often pretty tightly regulated because you could use WhatsApp to launder money, especially when the communication is end-to-end encrypted. So it's not impossible, but it would be a challenge on pretty uncharted territory. But hell, Nintendo pivoted from simple toys to video games successfully so this could work it pretty well.
pranau 8y ago
Actually, WhatsApp does support payments via the UPI framework in India. It hasn't caught up among businesses but it is gaining popularity among people to transfer cash from one person to another.

augbog 8y ago

I remember interviewing WhatsApp once. First thing I asked was how much does Facebook determine what comes down in terms of priority. The reply was "There might be some things but we are our own entity. It really hasn't affected us at all!" Few weeks later it was announced WhatsApp CEO quits due to privacy disagreements. lol

mnl 8y ago

They had a business model: you provide a service to your customers and your customers pay for it. As the service is awesome, customers stay. That's why for instance in Spain, it has been the de facto messaging standard for 7-8 years. People paid for it if they had to, even for the 3-year pack. They use WhatsApp for everything, it literally has replaced calls. If there are ads now this might change, as that will alienate everybody. They might consider Telegram (that'd be my bet). WhatsApp is considered standard functionality of your phone here, you'd change your mobile provider if they start playing ads in the middle of a call.

gonvaled 8y ago

I would pay for some extra features. From the top of my head: - several accounts (phone numbers) managed in a single WhatsApp installation - auto-forward messages from one number to another - integration with other services (gmail, gdrive, ...) - api, to scratch my itches

kenrick95 8y ago

Related blog post from WhatsApp: https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000648/Growing-our-Tools-for-Business https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000648/Growing-our-Tools-for-Bus...

voltagex_ 8y ago

Shit, I just convinced my parents to use WhatsApp instead of SMS. Time to start looking for an alternative. What's Telegram's business model? (yes, a good UI is a requirement and no, Signal isn't there yet).

smoovb 8y ago
Telegram just raising $1.7B in a crypto sale, which means it is the largest chat app not owned by a major corp or government. Plus familiar interface to Whatsapp, they won't even know you switched them.
- MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
  If you are ok with your traffic routed being to russia (and recently, Iran), not having default encryption on 1on1 chats and no encryption whatsoever on group chats - sure, choose Telegram. Not even counting the ICO, which is suspect in itself.
  - lloeki 8y ago
    > If you are ok with your traffic routed being to russia (and recently, Iran) Where does that come from? Because from what I gather it's precisely the opposite: Telegram users in Russia and Iran are leveraging proxies (sometimes run by volunteers) to get around their nations filtering. When you're using someone else's platform it all comes down to trust, and I'd rather trust an expat Russian that left his home country on grounds of being coerced into handing over user private information to his then nation's surveillance strike force and refused to bow down on that same nation's attempt to subvert his new platform then blocking half of the Internet's servers, than an app claiming to be end-to-end encrypted under the helm of a company that has time and time again been caught red-handed invading everyone's privacy and lying barefaced about it and whose monetisation and privacy strategy is denounced by the very founders of said chat app to the point of dropping everything on the floor and leaving said company.
    - MrBuddyCasino 8y ago

blocked_again 8y ago

Only if big companies stop trying to make the world a better place and leave companies like WhatsApp alone. WhatsApp was a small company making good enough money by respecting it's users. Then Facebook had to come and destroy everything isn't?

fiatjaf 8y ago

Great news! Now this madness will stop. Suffer, WhatsApp users!

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