3 ms·
Facebook Massively Overpaid for WhatsApp
- onion2k 13y agoThey could have promoted their version via Facebook itself and then spend a “cool” billion or two on advertising this globally and/or incentivizing installs. Assuming a $2b ad spend matched by $2b of internal Facebook promotion value, that'd give an user acquisition budget of around $8 per user. If the author thinks that'd be enough to tempt the majority of Whatsapp users to use a Facebook equivalent then he's grossly underestimated the value people put on Whatsapp - more specifically, the value in fact it wasn't Facebook. Facebook would have needed to spend a lot to overcome that. I have no doubt that someone at Facebook ran the numbers and realised it'd be cheaper to simply buy the opposition. I actually think Facebook would have paid a good bit more than they did.