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WhatsApp up until now was not pivoting to a full social network. That, on its own, was worth a lot to Facebook ; if WhatsApp did and was successful, it would ha
by beagle3 8y ago
WhatsApp up until now was not pivoting to a full social network. That, on its own, was worth a lot to Facebook ; if WhatsApp did and was successful, it would have cost Facebook much more than 20B, perhaps closer to 100B in value.
Now that FB got their money’s worth of “WhatsApp not competing”, they want to actually profit of it.
Also, whatsapp’s Interaction and name database (“metadata”) is super useful to Facebook. Likely not $1B useful, but still a database FB would otherwise pay millions for.