3 ms·
They didn't have to sell to FB they chose to. They had a history of flipping to paid versions of the app to cover costs and reduce growth. Their actual competit
by subdane 12y ago
They didn't have to sell to FB they chose to. They had a history of flipping to paid versions of the app to cover costs and reduce growth. Their actual competitors were carriers who charge exorbitant SMS fees internationally. At ~500M users their plan to simply charge $1/yr would have covered their costs.
- freebs 12y agoAnd they could also charge $2 or $3 and people would still gladly pay.
- stoev 12y agoI don't see it that way. After selling to FB it became clear that hey intended to launch VoIP. If they actually wanted to launch a high-quality product, better voice service than the one offered by carriers (and therefore much better than what Viber has to offer), they would probably have struggled to do it without the help of FB. Every carrier on earth would be against them.
- stoev 12y agoA carrier would give a lot more thought to disrupting a competitive voice service provided by FB (who already have many agreements with carriers worldwide regarding data usage) than an independent and not particularly well funded (by carrier standards) company like WhatsApp.
- subdane 12y agoMy point was simply that carriers were their competitors, not social networks. How does facebook help them fight?
- marquis 12y agoThis is something that never really sat right with me. How were they going to extract the $1 from every user? Most of their users do not have, and may never have, a credit card and signing up with every cellphone carrier to get your yearly $1 would have been a nightmare. I am not sure they would have gotten $1 out of even every 10 users.