What does WhatsApp’s upcoming monetisation mean for the company and its users?

https://factordaily.com/whatsapp-monetisation/

by dsr12 • 8 years ago

178 245 8 years ago

Whatsapp daily user here. I understand the need for them to monetize but the second they add advertising and companies into the mix, they lose the sheen of their app.

whatsapp is purely for talking to people I know. That's their selling point for me. I don't want to see companies, ads, offers, sweepstakes or curated content. Just me and my family/friends.

batiudrami3• 8 years ago

The fact is that you will likely continue to use WhatsApp as long as all your friends remain on there though. The trick is to work out how much garbage can be stuffed into the app before people will abandon it en masse.

I suspect the threshold is a little lower for Whatsapp than Facebook Messenger as WhatsApp has a higher third world user base who have older, slower handsets and will see performance difficulties - hence Facebook's Lite apps for Android.

msravi2• 8 years ago

That threshold is going to be very low, at least for me. If my friends decide not to move, I'll just switch back to plain old regular SMS. I already have an SMS app that has spam filters, and that'll do just fine.

product502• 8 years ago

No ads are coming in the messages part of Whatsapp. This is all about showing ads in the Status feature of Whatsapp. I am not sure if that will be enough for you to lose the sheen of their app..

anilgulecha• 8 years ago

Yet.

avip2• 8 years ago

Call me naive, but I hope and believe there’ll be a paid opt out

tomcooks• 8 years ago

At its very beginning, WhatsApp was a paid app so that wouldn't surprise me

chrisper• 8 years ago

I already paid for this app. Why should I pay again?

JumpCrisscross2• 8 years ago

I hope and believe there’ll be a paid opt out

I don’t. This isn’t how Facebook works. Paid opt outs drain the highest-earning advertisees from the pool. That removes Facebook’s ability to charge dubious ad rates.

Fnoord• 8 years ago

I'd rather pay than see ads, but either way I got a better alternative waiting for a network effect (Signal).

kayoone• 8 years ago

In some asian markets messengers are exactly the nightmare you describe and it seems to work brilliantly for them, users essentially spend all their time inside those messenger and even buy a lot of the stuff they need from there. If it's convenient enough, sadly not a lot of people will care.

umichguy3• 8 years ago

China and WeChat springs to the top of my mind. You can pretty much buy anything you need using it, including giving tips, giving money to buskers etc.

realusername7• 8 years ago

A better way to monetize than Ads would be to slightly follow the Telegram model, they should create a store, ability to access an API, bots... Whatsapp did not evolve much in the past 3 years, it's maybe time to make it larger than just a chat app and create a real platform. Especially when you have entire countries using the app.

avip2• 8 years ago

I believe whatsapp is so popular exactly because it did not evolve. People love wa as-is, why break it?

realusername7• 8 years ago

They don't necessarily need to "break it" but to evolve it a bit into a service. I'm sure you have people who would be happy to pay for bots, larger groups and business features (including myself). In some countries, WhatsApp is larger than a chat app, it's a social network but without any features, there's a gap somewhere here.

twelvechairs• 8 years ago

Money is the obvious answer

dingaling• 8 years ago

It evolved hugely in its early years; it was originally a one-line status-broadcasting app, hence the name.

And after the pivot to messaging they added embedded media, voice calling and now video calling.

buro9• 8 years ago

create a store, ability to access an API, bots

A way to charge the spammers?

I only recently discovered WhatsApp spam when a spammer joined by a group invite link. The link had never been published publicly, and yet a spammer joined some 18 months after the group was used (the group related to a moment in time).

If this is the way WhatsApp is going I'd rather less API access for spammers.

realusername7• 8 years ago

This is more looking like what the Ads would become, unsolicited spam messages. When I mean bots, I would only like manual subscription.

Tsubasachan• 8 years ago

Telegram is supported by some Russian rich guy who made money with Russian Facebook. The irony.

WhatsApp has a billion users, I understand that servers are not free.

teekert2• 8 years ago

Try investigating a bit more...

realusername7• 8 years ago

What's the irony in that, I don't get it?

And he tried until the end to put Telegram outside of the reach of the Russian government, even circumventing the Russian firewall.

gaius3• 8 years ago

I wonder if this will prompt Apple to open up group iMessage, such as BlackBerry (belatedly) attempting to go cross-platform with an app. Charge Android users $1/year or /month for access to the ecosystem or something. Bye-bye WhatsApp overnight, in lucrative developed markets.

batiudrami3• 8 years ago

Apple doesn't need 'em though. What's $1/year to a $265bn/year company? Maybe Apple converts a few hundred million of them to iMessage. 0.1% revenue bump in return for devaluing a USP of their product and increased ongoing development and operating costs.

Plus I think you overestimate Android users' propensity to hand over even $1 in return for no ads.

The reason Apple Music is on Android is that the larger userbase directly gives Apple more bargaining power with labels.

gaius3• 8 years ago

What's $1/year to a $265bn/year company? Maybe Apple converts a few hundred million of them to iMessage. 0.1% revenue bump in return for devaluing a USP of their product and increased ongoing development and operating costs.

It would just be the same as them selling a 99c app, and the goal would be some of those users for their next phone switching to iPhone. And more high-ground kudos as “the privacy company” which is where their marketing is positioned right now.

Plus I think you overestimate Android users' propensity to hand over even $1

It seems to be a general thing on all platforms, people will pay $1000 for a handset and $5 for a coffee but hesitate to spend 99c on an app.

product502• 8 years ago

If only it was so easy. Why would users pay when they can send messages sent for free? Also, iMessage is not materially adding new feature against what Messenger and Whatsapp already offer - so adoption is going to be a massive uphill battle.

iMessage succeeds on Apply only because it is the DEFAULT SMS app which Apple took over and converted into a full blown Messenger solution. Highly unlikely this playbook will work out on Android.

gaius3• 8 years ago

Why would users pay when they can send messages sent for free?

A combination of awareness that TANSTAAFL and network effects - RIM sold plenty of BB hardware to people who just wanted access to BBM because that’s where all their friends were, so there’s precedent.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume that even if there were a paid option for FB, Insta, WhatsApp they would still do everything they could to monetise personal data, because that’s just the kind of company FB is, rapacious.

sambe• 8 years ago

Because they don't want to see the ads being discussed here?

The parent's key point is going cross-platform to take market share from WhatsApp, not the exact funding model.

SmellyGeekBoy3• 8 years ago

Speak for yourself. I'm an Android user and I'd happily pay for iMessage.

briandear3• 8 years ago

iMessage is not materially adding new feature against what Messenger and Whatsapp already offer

Sure it does: it isn’t sending all of my data to an advertising company.

kriro2• 8 years ago

Interesting, this must be very different in other countries. Pretty much every iPhone owner I know communicates via instant messengers, usually WA and not iMessage.

saagarjha4• 8 years ago

I think this really depends on where you live and what kinds of communication apps people use, since it doesn't help to use iMessage if nobody is willing to talk to you when you do.

harrygeez• 8 years ago

why would they do that when iMessage is the #1 feature that keeps their users from ditching their $1000 phones

abhiminator2• 8 years ago

I still remember the first installation of WhatsApp messenger on an old Samsung device of mine in 2012 as a high-schooler. It was incredibly liberating to finally discover an IM app that enabled me to send unlimited messages to my friends and not get hamstrung by SMS limits that existed in my country; especially one that was resource-light enough to run on my device's 866 MHz processor.

I'd largely glossed over Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp back in '14 as just another big tech company eating up a smaller 'potential future competitor,' but in hindsight it looks like it was the beginning of the end of WhatsApp as a simple, reliable and ad-free private messenger.

Super glad I quit the platform in 2017 -- never been more tranquil.

cauldron2• 8 years ago

All company need to make money, it's just a matter of when and how, Facebook's resources may have even did them good, as they can stay away from predatory investment funds that otherwise would bite they hard in the end.

mnsc• 8 years ago

Messaging is infrastructure and nothing that any single company should "need to make money" off.

RCS can't come fast enough. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/

baby10• 8 years ago

What? If anything, WhatsApp has become a better product since its acquisition. It is currently the simplest, most reliable, ad-free messenger out there, which also supports state of the art end-to-end encryption for its millions of users.

Let's see how they deploy ads. But it would be a shame that WhatsApp shut downs because Facebook cannot monetize the application. If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.

abhiminator2• 8 years ago

Ads are a slippery slope. It might begin with text-only ads in 'Status' but I think it's only a matter of time before they spill over into other, more private sections of the application.

And I do not trust Facebook Inc. to put privacy over profits [0] given it's trashy record in this space.

End-to-end encryption is a valid point, but WhatsApp was not the first to pioneer it. Scale-wise it just got lucky, and Facebook just threw in a bunch of dollars from its coffers to acquire all that.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act...

f_allwein• 8 years ago

end-to-end encryption

Well, they do collect and use metadata, e.g. chat history: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whats...

There's better options regarding privacy, e.g. Signal, which does not collect metadata.

techsupporter2• 8 years ago

Let's see how they deploy ads. ... If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.

I understand why you hold this view but woe I wish it to be that more people agreed with me and held the opposite. I wish we were fine with paying money instead of "being monetized" and having ads shoved in front of us.

I don't want to see how they deploy the ads; I don't want ads, period. By their very nature, ads are a guarantee that I'm going to be tracked, sliced, analyzed, deanonymized, and attention-grabbed any time I crack open that app. I guess I'm turning more and more into the Luddite but I am tired of the ads, tired of the continual chase for my ever-decreasing number of seconds on this planet.

I don't even know that letting me pay to not have ads is a) practical (because what's to say the ads aren't being shown in a "hidden" way such that I am still tracked and followed) or b) fair (because what about the other billions of people on the planet for whom money can't be traded for time as they have more of the latter than the former yet still don't deserve to be tracked). But I still don't like ads.

kriro2• 8 years ago

I think the other two "mainstream" messengers I use (Telegram, KakaoTalk) are as simple or simpler and also ad-free. Kakao also has E2E encryption after a bit of a struggle, Telegram had it for a long time.

I think WA is the most widespread but I wouldn't call it the simplest or most reliable. They are all pretty similar imo

diazon2• 8 years ago

A better product? I don't like most of the things they've added, like statuses, stickers, or invite links.

SmellyGeekBoy3• 8 years ago

I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.

Why is this an either/or situation? Why not give users the option to pay if they so choose?

briandear3• 8 years ago

iMessage is far easier and reliable and it even falls back to SMS if your recipient doesn’t have iOS. It also doesn’t give your data to Facebook.

emiliobumachar• 8 years ago

They won't shut it down after paying billions (10?) for it. If they do, an alternative could rise. Imagine paying billions again. Running costs are very cheap in comparison.

namdnay2• 8 years ago

To be fair, the ad-free honeymoon that you were living in was obviously not a feasible steady state. Your messaging experience was being sponsored by VCs in the expectation of selling you to someone, in this case facebook

zimablue• 8 years ago

Yeah, how could a service like sending text messages from one device to another be free in the long term!? Think of the infrastructure and technology costs.

No, wait, most people on this forum could knock up a messaging app in a couple of days and run it on aws lambda for less than pennies per user per year.

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

I'm being snarky but I really don't get your point, nothing about this is expensive or difficult. Signal case in point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103877

calv• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure when I joined Whatsapp you could pay to have access for a couple of years, so it had a sustainable model, especially if they just turned the dial slowly on pricing.

def_true_false3• 8 years ago

WhatsApp charged users $1 per year until January 2016, when they had somewhere between 900M and 1000M users. Not sure how many of them were paying, since it wasn't really being enforced.

skrebbel• 8 years ago

I remember reading in some Brian Acton interview that Facebook leadership believes that ads would bring in more money than charging businesses for access, integrations and premium features.

Living in a country where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, I really don't understand that. Is it just a lack of imagination on Facebook's part? Companies, from tiny ones all the way up to enterprises, will pay serious money to be able support customers over WhatsApp in an effective way. And then I've not even begun to consider the marketing channel WhatsApp could be (also without turning into a spam hotbed).

Facebook is the gatekeeper to WhatsApp, effectively a monopoly to a piece of core telecom infrastructure for a lot of countries. They could squeeze this out to the max. Right now, they give all of this away for nearly free and share the profit with the likes of MessageBird and Twilio. TBH i'd prefer they tax businesses than my eyeballs.

johnchristopher2• 8 years ago

I remember reading in some Brian Acton interview that Facebook leadership believes that ads would bring in more money than charging businesses for access, integrations and premium features.

Verbatim: it wouldn't scale.

Acton said he tried to push Facebook towards an alternative, less privacy hostile business model for WhatsApp — suggesting a metered-user model such as by charging a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up.

But that “very simple business” idea was rejected outright by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who he said told him “it won’t scale”.

“I called her out one time,” Acton also told Forbes. “I was like, ‘No, you don’t mean that it won’t scale. You mean it won’t make as much money as…,’ and she kind of hemmed and hawed a little.

It looks like to me that the multi-billion dollar company that Facebook is, with all the very intelligent people working there, is a one pony trick that only knows how to make money by putting ads everywhere.

realusername7• 8 years ago

That's exactly it, Facebook is an advertising business and they struggle to think that they would be better and other ways to monetize a product, especially on WhatsApp where you have entire countries using it.

amalag• 8 years ago

"It won't scale" means they would have to hire sales people to go after businesses.

threeseed3• 8 years ago

You make it sound like Facebook doesn't know how. Of course they do.

It's just that ads is significantly more profitable than having to run sales teams in the 200 odd countries around the world. Especially since ads is largely self service even down to ML models monitoring abuse.

cityzen2• 8 years ago

I think the real reason FB went public even though zuck “didn’t really want to” is so they could hide behind shareholder value as their excuse for everything. Public companies don’t go public to innovate, they go public to make everyone money. This is the model currently destroying America.

netcan2• 8 years ago

The problem with charging (any amount) is network effects. When the value of a service depends on other users using it, anything that limits user numbers is a no-go.

The reason the business rationale for WhatsApp (and lots of other digital services) is so wired is because the normal dynamics is supply and demand don't apply.

In a "normal" market, the cost of providing a service and revenue tend to be similar... because companies compete on price.

The revenue potential of WhatsApp is completely unrelated to the cost of inventing or running WhatsApp. The revenue potential has nothing to do with the value to customers. Weird inputs, weird outputs.

_nalply• 8 years ago

Perhaps they aren't willing to support businesses. After all if I pay I can badger them with questions. And that's what they want to avoid.

tonyedgecombe• 8 years ago

Presumably advertisers can do the same.

saagarjha4• 8 years ago

Business Chat (for iMessage) does exactly this, though I haven't actually interacted with a company this way yet, so I can't say how good of an experience it is.

hoaw• 8 years ago

There are many thing you could do with it, but I don't think Facebook is really interested in developing it as its own business. They probably just want to incorporate it into their own machine.

rorykoehler• 8 years ago

I would stop using Whatsapp if they introduced ads. Most of my immediate network would to. Ads in non-chat apps is undesirable by acceptable. Chat is where I go for a very specific use case. Ads would piss my off incredibly. I don't want my attention hijacked in the app I use for personal and direct communication.

teekert2• 8 years ago

I have many friends and a whole family who don't care about this. I tried to get people on Signal but it worked only for a handful.

It would be nice if at leat I could pay to keep WA clean (and please let me pay to keep my addresses to myself as well), because leaving it completely is impossible for now. Here in the Netherlands WA is the communications standard, even most company helpdesks are on it.

Angostura• 8 years ago

The reason I don’t use WhatsApp is simply because it requires full, unfettered access to your entire contacts to work properly.

When I explain to people that giving Facebook access to the contact details of my bank, psychotherapist, doctor, all work colleagues etc., they tend to understand

JumpCrisscross2• 8 years ago

it requires full, unfettered access to your entire contacts to work properly

I don’t give it these permissions. It requires punching in phone numbers, but that adds the right amount of friction to bounce communications to iMessage or a call.

Freak_NL5• 8 years ago

I manage quite well without it, and many other Dutch do too. I will fight for a society that doesn't depend on a tool that can only be used by getting into a legal agreement with Facebook and makes owning either an Android or IOS smartphone a requirement.

Fuck these walled gardens.

Maarten88• 8 years ago

I manage quite well without it, and many other Dutch do too

I wonder how you can manage without WA in the Netherlands. For me, all group events, sports, kids' activities, trips, vacations, family things, etc are managed in a whatsapp group. To "App" has entered daily Dutch vocabulary as a verb (meaning sending a whatsapp message). I'm in dozens of groups (none of them created by me) and participating in anything without it would be very unpractical.

garyclarke27• 8 years ago

After moving to Portugal from UK, and terrible experience with local telecoms provider MEO (lies and horrific bills) I have to use VOIP. Recently I’ve switched to using WhatsApp instead of Skype for most voice calls, curious if others are doing the same?? Audio Quality is mostly good and it’s much easier to find contacts than with Skype, because it’s based on their mobile number not a Skype ID. On monetisation I would pay for voice calls to landlines/mobiles. Also maybe they could do some kind of deal for international data roaming packages linked to a separate WhatsApp number. Predictable reasonable costs for voice and data - linked to a single mobile number - is still a major unsolved problem for travellers.

umichguy3• 8 years ago

I am in the UK/ EU as well, my friends and I mostly use Whatsapp, FB messenger, Facetime for voice/video calls (especially when traveling/roaming) as most of them use this. Skype is mainly used for business or other "non-quick" purposes.Quite a few of them don't even have Skype enabled in the "always on" mode, open and login only when needed, unlike the others I mentioned.

siquick• 8 years ago

I always find the voice calls on WA much lower in volume than normal phone calls.

nicoburns2• 8 years ago

Hardly anyone I know uses skype anymore, due to their call quality being significantly worse than the competition, and it eating up battery life.

Facebook Messenger and whatsapp dominate the home market. Zoom.us, slack, hangouts and others are popular for business.

yazaddaruvala3• 8 years ago

Please join my protest:

If you see an ad on Facebook messenger or WhatsApp, don’t hide it, instead Report It.

Report it as sexual content, report it as a scam, report it for whatever reason.

Guidelines, try to use different reasons and try to make it a realistic reason.

Facebook likes to gather our data for their ML, so let’s weaponize it. If we feed their platform garbage data, the ML will block the ads automatically, driving advertisers away or making report handling prohibitively expensive.

We likely only need 0.01% of users to feed garbage data to trigger their ML decisions. They’ll eventually be forced to find a better alternative.

namdnay2• 8 years ago

So you will make individual ads less effective, therefore lowering their value, therefore lowering their cost, therefore in order to secure revenue facebook will need to show you more ads?

tinus_hn3• 8 years ago

No, he is just making reports less effective.

gota• 8 years ago

This is interesting, but I have a feeling I'd face less resistance with friends and family if I just tried to switch them over to Signal and be done with the whole problem

3eto• 8 years ago

I've been helping family and closest friends to ditch WhatsApp for Signal, without much success, so decided to come up with a deadline, announced to everyone and will be deleting WhatsApp then.

More friends have joined Signal the week I told them I was living by the deadline than in the previous years, where I was mostly ignored.

thecatspaw• 8 years ago

I click on all ads that my adblocker doesnt filter. Charges them the PPC price while still beeing worthless. If enough people do that it will stop beeing worth it to the advertiser

threeseed3• 8 years ago

It's not like there are dozens of Facebook out there. There's one. And nobody has targeting capabilities like they do. So if your product/company is suited to this marketing channel then you're going to stay with Facebook irrespective of whether the PPC price goes up by 1c. Which is probably the maximum effect you could ever hope to achieve.

eps• 8 years ago

It's trivial for them to auto-ignore such reports when they are coming from an account with abnormally high report rates. The effect of your protest will be, effectively, null.

yazaddaruvala3• 8 years ago

Only if you don’t join :)

threeseed3• 8 years ago

No offence but this is hilariously stupid.

All you're doing is following the same blackhat strategy that has been tried and prevented years ago. You know the one where you keep flagging your competitor's ads as abusive in the hope of getting them taken down. It's basically the same as click fraud.

In your case it's even more stupid since I assume you're doing so with a logged in account and without using proxy services so your IP will be static.

I guarantee that your reports has changed nothing other than make it more likely that your account is going to banned for abusing their terms of service.

Freak_NL5• 8 years ago

Or just added to the bozo-file, meaning all your reports will be deleted unseen automatically, but it looks like everything works on your end.

true_religion• 8 years ago

If you report too many ads, Facebook turns off your ability to report ads.

fragebogen• 8 years ago

What about us who actually paid 1€/$ for WhatsApp in the first place?

thijsvandien• 8 years ago

That was a price per year and it's been a while since you paid that.

ahakki• 8 years ago

Initially IIRC it was a 99 Cent App on the App Store without an annual fee, as there were no in-app purchases on iOS yet

onetimemanytime• 8 years ago

Whatsapp paid for itself, more or less, IMO. A lot of people don't need FB to stay in touch with extended family, just Whatsapp groups. They are still in FB ecosystem, of sort.

FB needs to worry about the next quarter so they might ruin this and allow other apps to take over.

aneeqdhk• 8 years ago

As a business owner, I would love to use Whatsapp to communicate with my users. Not to spam or advertise, just communicate. The email open rates for our target audience (Indian college students) are abysmal, and SMS is just too unpredictable (but what we end up using because that's the best we've got).

I reckon that there would be similar business owners in my predicament who would just like to genuinely notify users. Just like with email, users can have an opt-out option as well.

I think some of this functionality is already there in their Business API (which is quite opaque fwiw).

On the other hand, I can see how this can quickly devolve into spam if used incorrectly (which is inevitable).

sxp62000• 8 years ago

There's no stopping Facebook from shoving ads down our throats, but I hope they consider creating an option to remove the ads and provide extra features. For example, charge me something per year to add chat+media backups and group video calls.

Also, before Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook, didn't they charge something like 99 cents per year to provide backups?

Pica_soO• 8 years ago

I wonder, could one use users as bridges- like in irc - and communicate with whats app groups from outside the walled garden?

tmalsburg22• 8 years ago

I like WhatsApp because it works really well and is easy to use. But on the day I see an ad and no option to get rid of ads by upgrading to a paid subscription, I will close my account.

atomicnumber12• 8 years ago

I will close my account. And here lies the issue. Just you closing the account doesn't work. Your friends, your family, others you talk to on whatsapp shall also migrate. And that's the biggest issue.

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

I could never get my family on whatsapp in the first place, so I’m not too concerned.

reitanqild3• 8 years ago

Successfully participated in moving my entire family and in law family and another group of 300+ members since Facebook bought them.

None of those people use Whatsapp anymore as they prefer other solutions.

I still have WhatsApp on one device and it is active but nobody contacts me there anymore.

Feels good.

tmalsburg22• 8 years ago

I previously closed a ton of other social media accounts and guess what, my friends are still my friends and my family has not abandoned me. In fact I have more time for friends and family now. In hind-sight most social media use was just a giant waste of my time. Now people just call me or send me an e-mail when they need to contact me. Signal-to-noise is much better.

pier255• 8 years ago

In Mexico and Spain everyone uses Whatsapp.

iOS users don't use iMessage since SMS are expensive, and not using Whatsapp would be social ostracisation since Android has a bigger market share than in the US.

In Mexico a lot of businesses have support numbers via Whatsapp. Heck, you can even order food and other stuff like LPG gas.

flurdy2• 8 years ago

When Netflix a few months ago prompted me with "Hey your number is a Whatsapp account, do mind if we send notifications via Whatsapp?" I was generally horrified.

It felt a serious transgression of my privacy. Though in hindsight I realised it was an easy task, I can, after all, see if people are using Whatsapp if I have their number so there is little to stop companies doing the same lookup if they have my number.

But it felt very uncomfortable.

I don't want companies involved with my Whatsapp, it is exclusively for messaging my missus, and group chats with friends and family. Nothing else.

I did read somewhere that one of the founders said the aim was to integrate apps/companies into Whatsapp, but for me "No!".

I am dreading what the ad monetisation will be like. Since everyone I am friends with, related to or worked with use Whatsapp, their market penetration is ubiquitous here in my London ecosphere. Hope they don't ruin that.

yesforwhat• 8 years ago

I did read somewhere that one of the founders said the aim was to integrate apps/companies into Whatsapp, but for me "No!".

Everyone on WeChat claims it's amazing, I hated it.

gsich2• 8 years ago

I did read somewhere that one of the founders said the aim was to integrate apps/companies into Whatsapp, but for me "No!".

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp

Already__Taken• 8 years ago

Whatsapp specifically though, it is just your phone number. You don't have that control over your phone number. Seems a little harsh to hold that one company to higher standards than literally anything else with your number.

Direct marketing rules should still apply, in the UK you can't legally cold-call mobile numbers.

I mean, I get it I agree with you and use whatsapp the same way. The one time I tried to use it to message for a takeaway they just ignored the order.

flurdy2• 8 years ago

To be fair to Netflix it was a polite question banner at the top of the screen. Though fairly large and in your face. They did re-prompt a few times, but I have not seen it for a while now.

But it caught me off guard as I was not expecting it. And did not welcome it.

I wonder what the stats are for their members' responses. Maybe was just an A-B test.

josteink• 8 years ago

I was generally horrified.

So was I and I immediately finished my relation with WhatsApp.

There’s no one there I can’t get on Facebook, Instagram or signal.

mbesto• 8 years ago

There’s no one there I can’t get on Facebook, Instagram or signal.

I'm actually waiting for FB/Whatsapp to announce it's specific monetization strategy so that it becomes the trigger to tell my friends/family on WhatsApp off of it and onto Signal. Otherwise, you're correct, it's very difficult to convince people otherwise.

nashashmi2• 8 years ago

the aim was to integrate apps/companies into Whatsapp, but for me "No!".

When Facebook opened themselves up to everyone instead of College students, I felt the same way. When FB opened up to companies, I cancelled my account.

In the end it didn't matter. Companies were creating FB accounts anyway. Curbing them to a more explicit form of corporateship was the right thing to do than let them masquerade as users.

Internationally, WhatsApp is a very large force in both friendly communications and corporate/public/commercial avenues to communicate. Creating a WhatsApp business account (payable) to communicate with customers is the right thing to do. And I would not mind it as long as it is behind a portal and filter.

nashashmi2• 8 years ago

Why did you give them your phone number anyways?

OJFord• 8 years ago

Mandatory; account recovery.

raverbashing• 8 years ago

Yes, I definitely don't want Netflix (or any other websites) sending me stuff through WhatsApp

I don't want, I don't care and while I don't find it "terrifying" I DO think it's an annoyance not asked for

If I want to see what's new there I go there. Period.

seltzered_• 8 years ago

I did read somewhere that one of the founders said the aim was to integrate apps/companies into Whatsapp, but for me "No!".

This was from the Forbes interview with whatsapp founder Brian Acton ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive... )

"An SMS has just come in from his local Honda dealer saying “payment received.” He points to it on his phone.

“This is what I wanted people to do with WhatsApp,” he says of the world’s biggest messaging service, which is used by more than 1.5 billion people and provides ad-free, encrypted messaging as a core feature. “This was informational, and useful.""

"Acton had proposed monetizing WhatsApp through a metered-user model, charging, say, a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up. “You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country,” Acton says. “You don’t need a sophisticated sales force. It’s a very simple business.”

Acton’s plan was shot down by Sandberg. “Her words were ‘It won’t scale.’ ”"

Edit: someone else also mentioned this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18431281

reaperducer2• 8 years ago

"An SMS has just come in from his local Honda dealer saying “payment received.” He points to it on his phone.

Forgive my skepticism, but this sounds fake to me. Unless there are countries where you local auto dealer finances your car. Everywhere I've lived, financing goes through a bank or the manufacturer's bank/bank partner (GMAC, etc...).

ratherbefuddled2• 8 years ago

You know you don't have to give Netflix your mobile number right?

intopieces• 8 years ago

The article mentions ads on the private feed. I don’t use this feature, is it the leftmost tab — statuses?

Since most of the world runs on Android, they are already accustomed to ad supported software. While not a welcome change for me, I doubt I will ever encounter them.

addedlovely• 8 years ago

Facebook killed their core platform by watering down the communication between my friends and family with business adverts and pages.

I suspect they will kill WhatsApp the same way.

pier255• 8 years ago

I would gladly pay a "pro" subscription to get rid of ads.

I've already tried to move friends and colleagues to Signal. It didn't work.

pgm8705• 8 years ago

Why do you think it didn't work? I've had the same experience, but with trying to move friends from telegram to signal. For me, I think it is because telegram is such a better experience from a UI standpoint. Signal is getting better, but it still feels clunkly.

pier255• 8 years ago

I think it's simple inertia.

Maybe I should try again with Telegram. It looks quite nice.

Yizahi• 8 years ago

I highly doubt that Whatsapp was ever for user privacy. Have you tried installing it first time? It won't function without permission to intercept your SMS, it won't function without giving it complete contact list (as opposed to select few numbers) and so on. And of course that data is sold... er... how they say it now - "analyzed" or "exchanged".

user59944613• 8 years ago

The SMS interception permission can be disabled.

It's only used the first time you register your phone number to whatspp, to send a SMS with a unique code to verify the number. Someone thought it was a good idea to intercept all SMS rather than have the user write the code.

Mc_Big_G• 8 years ago

Hopefully it means everyone stops using Whatsapp (Facebook)

thinkloop2• 8 years ago

Signal is open-source and can be forked if they ever add ads, it's the final answer.

robjan2• 8 years ago

It has a place (I use to to communicate with my friends in China, rather than using WeChat) but it's clunky and delivery is unreliable even to people in countries without censorship. Sometimes messages take hours to arrive at the other side.

sandov3• 8 years ago

AFAIK, It requires Google play services, which is a deal breaker.

redsparrow• 8 years ago

For others, who may not have seen this reply to the same comment above, it's no longer required:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18434172

tsunamifury• 8 years ago

Its interesting that many people here don't seem to know that in most of the world WhatsApp is already the go-to business messaging platform and a large portion of its user base subscribes to business services via WhatsApp. Organic promotion groups, local business contacts, and messaging lists have existed in India and other regions for a long time now. Its interesting to me that it seems that in the EU/US users generally so shocked by this.

calimac• 8 years ago

Can Anyone build a what's app replacement and does anyone want to JV to market and scale the app through the wave of pissed off users that is eminent upon the roll out of WhatsApp Monetization.

We know one thing. Whats app monetization will be so nefarious and parasitic that there will be a mass exodus. Be there to catch the fall out and provide a responsible replacement that respects data sovereignty of individuals.

The opportunity is inbound now.

garysahota93• 8 years ago

I really don't mind the ads - they are a business after all. This will just push me to stop using the platform.

HOWEVER, I wish they had chosen a different monetization tactic. I would have much rather paid their $1 a year for the service. And given the amount of users they have, that could generate more than enough revenue for them to fund development.

Additionally, monetizing businesses and their integration into the platform also seems like a great idea. The businesses that find value in the platform will more than happily pay for the service.

Or, another idea: why not make me just pay for chat backup (like $1 a year for the app, $10 a year for chat storage, $20 a year for chat and pic storage, $30 a year for chat/pic/video storage) or something like that. That's something that's user AND privacy friendly.

It just makes me really sad that these ads are what Facebook chose. It's an excuse to not innovate and find creative ways to increase their revenue. It seems like they're taking the easy way out.

dbbk2• 8 years ago

They already had that setup. Facebook removed the $1 a year subscription when they bought it.

tmaly• 8 years ago

If I start seeing ads, I will move back to regular SMS. It is that simple.

anoncoward111• 8 years ago

I use whatsapp for tons of foreign numbers and sending images. SMS is torturously bad for this use-case!

I would tolerate any amount of ads for this service, or alternatively pay maybe $10 a year.

What does WhatsApp’s upcoming monetisation mean for the company and its users?

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