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Facebook's New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money (wsj.com)
Deepa Seetharaman, writing for WSJ: Four years after Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion, it is formally starting the messaging app on a new mission: bringing in revenue. WhatsApp on Wednesday detailed plans to sell advertisements and charge big companies that want to reach their customers through its service [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled: alternative source], launching its first major revenue streams as growth at Facebook's main app is starting to decelerate. The measures are aimed at connecting businesses with WhatsApp's user base of roughly 1.5 billion accounts, WhatsApp executives said.
The announcements follow disagreements between Facebook leaders and WhatsApp's co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, over how to monetize the popular, free service. Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton resisted efforts to put ads in WhatsApp, and over the past year both men have decided to leave Facebook and the messaging app they started in 2009 -- a breakup that was the subject of a Page One article in The Wall Street Journal in June. [...] Next year, WhatsApp plans to show ads in its Status feature, company officials told the Journal. Status allows users to post montages of text, photos and video that appear for 24 hours -- similar to an Instagram tool called Stories. About 450 million people use WhatsApp Status, compared with about 400 million who use Instagram Stories, which already shows ads.
The announcements follow disagreements between Facebook leaders and WhatsApp's co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, over how to monetize the popular, free service. Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton resisted efforts to put ads in WhatsApp, and over the past year both men have decided to leave Facebook and the messaging app they started in 2009 -- a breakup that was the subject of a Page One article in The Wall Street Journal in June. [...] Next year, WhatsApp plans to show ads in its Status feature, company officials told the Journal. Status allows users to post montages of text, photos and video that appear for 24 hours -- similar to an Instagram tool called Stories. About 450 million people use WhatsApp Status, compared with about 400 million who use Instagram Stories, which already shows ads.
Step 1: Spend bazillions on a company that has not made profit.
Step 2: Demand magic profit.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Divestment, the idea of profiting to the tune of the value of these unicorns is utterly absurd.
When I first signed up for WhatsApp, they had a great way of making money -- 1 year free, subsequent years $1/year. I was so excited when I saw that -- FINALLY, a platform that will just let me pay to use it, rather than trying to spam me with junk and sell my information!
When FB bought the company and cancelled the yearly fee, I knew it was only a matter of time. I'm mostly surprised it took them so long.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Not to sling mud on Telegram, but there was a story here saying the devs had to hand over their encryption keys: https://it.slashdot.org/story/... In the comments, a strong case for using Signal as a secure messenger can be found.
Google didn't overpay for Youtube. Google bought the largest video site on the planet. Google now controls two of the 3 largest websites on the planet (in the western hemisphere anyway). $1.65bn was money well spent to prevent a competitor either emerging, or another well funded competitor using Youtube to undermine their ad dominance. Youtube is now making quite a bit of money for Google. Money well spent.
What do you think of Microsoft buying Github for $7.5B? Makes the Youtube purchase look like genius.