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Yes, but many of the people who use the service are in developing countries where free is always considered better. If they had to charge those people WhatsApp

Yes, but many of the people who use the service are in developing countries where free is always considered better. If they had to charge those people WhatsApp never would have taken off in those locales like it has.

adrianN 6y ago
How much money can you expect to make from users that can't afford $1/year? I can't imagine that you get a lot from ads in that target population.
- aero-glide2 6y ago
  It isn't about "not being able to afford". Why pay $1 when a free alternative is available?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    This. I live in Austria where the average income is high among the developed world and even here, through a poll on reddit, most people said they are not willing to pay for any private/secure messaging platforms on the arguments that "why pay for something I can get for free?" and "I have nothing important in my communications worth datamining" or "I already have a Facebook account so they already have all my private info, what's the point of privacy at this point?". So even people with good incomes are super stingy when it comes to paying even a couple of bucks for things that they are used to being free and don't care much for online privacy as long as their basic needs are being met. IMHO, until a massive hack/leak hits one of these free services, people can't be bothered to care.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> in developing countries where free is always considered better Free is considered better by everyone everywhere. Which makes me think back to the anti-open-source propaganda of the 90s, that hippie commies will ruin software by giving everything away for free. While this was ridiculed back in the day, I think we can see now that there was quite a big nugget of truth in it. In the past decades, we've discovered the perfect, competition-destroying, ubermodel of software distribution: free, subsidized by advertising. This model is a source of unending pathologies (including, but not limited to, the ones described in the article), and it cannot be reasonably competed with.

adrianN 6y ago

How much money can you expect to make from users that can't afford $1/year? I can't imagine that you get a lot from ads in that target population.

aero-glide2 6y ago
It isn't about "not being able to afford". Why pay $1 when a free alternative is available?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  This. I live in Austria where the average income is high among the developed world and even here, through a poll on reddit, most people said they are not willing to pay for any private/secure messaging platforms on the arguments that "why pay for something I can get for free?" and "I have nothing important in my communications worth datamining" or "I already have a Facebook account so they already have all my private info, what's the point of privacy at this point?". So even people with good incomes are super stingy when it comes to paying even a couple of bucks for things that they are used to being free and don't care much for online privacy as long as their basic needs are being met. IMHO, until a massive hack/leak hits one of these free services, people can't be bothered to care.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> in developing countries where free is always considered better Free is considered better by everyone everywhere. Which makes me think back to the anti-open-source propaganda of the 90s, that hippie commies will ruin software by giving everything away for free. While this was ridiculed back in the day, I think we can see now that there was quite a big nugget of truth in it. In the past decades, we've discovered the perfect, competition-destroying, ubermodel of software distribution: free, subsidized by advertising. This model is a source of unending pathologies (including, but not limited to, the ones described in the article), and it cannot be reasonably competed with.