>>It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. This isn't that much of a factor. FB paid $19bn for Whatsapp. A small profit on a $100m or $500m r

>>It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. This isn't that much of a factor. FB paid $19bn for Whatsapp. A small profit on a $100m or $500m revenue base is never going to justify even a fraction of that acqisition price. FB sort of set this standard themselves. They didn't pay attention to revenue early, as the movie said: A million dollars isn't cool. A billion users is cool. At IPO-time, those billion users still didn't ad up to revenue. This is much later than google, who had a mature business model much earlier. Then, FB actually did find a formula to turn their 2 bn free users into a revneue stream. They proved it can be done. Putting on the ruthless analyst hat... There are two reasons for the whatsapp bidding war: (1) keep it from the competition (2) potentially turn 2bn users into >$2bn revenue. FB already achieved no. 1. The ruthless business thing to do would be to force whatsapp to bet the house on achieving no. 2.