everyone saw this coming the day facebook bought it, but the real issue isn't ads in status . it's that the platform is now locked into meta's attention monetization engine. the founders explicitly said no ads. now not only ads, but paid channels, algorithmic exposure, and user segmentation creeping in. most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws. this isn't about revenue, it's about control. they’re reshaping a private messaging tool into a broadcast platform with tracking hooks. and most users won’t even notice until it’s too embedded to undo
They kinda did. Before facebook brought them, the app cost $1/£1 per year (iirc your first year was free). Thing is back then MMS and/or texts across borders was expensive, so if you were regularly sending picture messages to people the $1/£1 sub was a no brainer.
Lets wave a magic wand and presume 50% of the user base thought it was also worth $1 a year and it grew just as well as it did (It was growing very well in the UK before the takeover just by word of mouth). That's still just a messaging app that would be raking in $1.5B per year today, and that's before you bolt on any paid cosmetics or upgrades (small things that users don't mind dropping a few more bucks on).
Thing is, it already was getting that adoption, and network effect can largely take care of the rest. Also, some it’s tied to a real phone number, geographic price differentiation is trivial to implement.
Ok I paid the 1 buck, or agreed to pay a year later. Those days I lived in India, and my friend kinda forced me to use whatsapp by selling it. I still remember sitting in an auto-rickshaw and downloading the app after the sales pitch :) This must have been 2012, but could it be earlier - maybe.
Point being, I agree with you, it was getting that adoption anyways, even with the fees. And within months, I was hearing this from so many others.
How do I remember? I moved back to US in Feb 2013, so it had to be before that, just can not recall the exact year and month.
And my understanding back then was that enforcement of payment was via the honour system. It was even possible to pay for your contacts, likely to make it as low friction as possible especially as paying for something on the internet was still a relatively new thing.
Not really. They claimed they'd charge this but then kept giving away free time to huge numbers of people because this wasn't an actual business model, they did it just to slow their growth down when they were running out of server capacity. It's discussed in some interview with the founder, iirc.
WhatsApp integrates into the rest of Meta ads machine so it distribute leads from facebook and instagram directly to whatsapp. It also makes money with spam.
How many of the people posting here that criticize this move are owners of Meta stock? The number is certainly above 50%, at least for those in the US, since most people with a retirement plan will own Meta in some form. It's the need to satisfy shareholders with new earnings.
Well, I'm saying we should be hesitant to immediately throw out blame for pursuing profit, because it's not just more money for Zuckerberg and other billionaires. If retirement funds were growing at 2%, the same people criticizing this decision would be looking for alternative investment vehicles.
What choice do we have? Indeed, I would rather prefer that the companies that comprise the broad market embrace some form of ESG ethos, but that's clearly out of vogue these days. I vote to that extent, but I'm a breathtakingly small portion of the vote when it comes to corporate governance.
> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws.
I don't have high hopes either but people did stop using Messenger in favor of WhatsApp, so they can absolutely stop using WhatsApp too.
The "mistake" (if you're evil) those apps make is that they use your phone number as unique identifier, not a login. So if you switch app, you still have the phone number of all your friends.
Although those apps are still out there, i really miss those days were all you needed was some kind of unique identifier like a nickname, username or something like that an email address and some fancy password (and you weren't even pestered about to provide a phone number anywhere!).
No system can credibly claim to sustain massive consumer scale until proven in real life.
Even if your technical architecture supports scale and federation, these are just some threats off the top of my head:
- spam, fraud and Sybil attacks, deteriorating the experience for everyone
- infighting, forking among maintainers of core libs and protocols
- maintainers get poached by mega corps
- hostile takeovers of foundations, trademarks and auxiliary institutions
- a single entity within federation gets too large and imposes their own changes that can’t be rejected without losing majority of users or forking (see infighting)
- VC/deep-pocket subsidized competition offering free service (say eg video calls) and unlimited marketing, OEM pre-installs etc, to poach critical mass of users
I love the idea of federated systems. But I think some of us nerds think too much about tech and too little about the social and economic dynamics of the real world.
I agree. That’s an interesting model for chat. But remember, modern email is quite complex when you add all the standards for authenticity and security together, as well as informal requirements like spam filtering. But even if self-hosting were a pain, it’d still be an improvement over today’s fragmentation-by-app status quo.
Right. Instant messaging should be considered basic / core utility like ISPs. I can pay a cheap or even a free one and they'll probably sell my data or I can pay more for an ISP that preserve my privacy
Seem to remember paying for WhatsApp when I first downloaded it. I’d be happy to keep paying. Just not the amount that they can make from advertising. Solution maybe to ban intrusive advertising so they can’t make a lot of money from it that way?
I would be happy to pay few bucks a month for an instant messaging service to make sure it's independent. I consider it basic necessity like internet on my phone.
The problem is the fragmentation. We need federation first across all providers and then everyone could choose whatever provider they want to pay for
Maybe not the best example. Whatsapp started out as a paid service (even if it was comparably cheap, somewhere around a dollar per year comes to mind), but that didn't help them. They have followed the same trajectory as everyone else.
No one exists in isolation, if the market values your user base at ten billion then that is what it is. That also indirectly means someone with deep pockets could spend that order of magnitude of resources to compete with you. No one really wants to know how customer acquisition or sausages are made.
The best counter example is perhaps wikipedia. But they exist in a very special niche. Lots of people have tried foundations in other places only to be outspent by a loss leader.
I paid for WhatsApp, USD 1 for year for a few years. They dropped the fee back in 2016.
If WhatsApp wasn't part of Meta they would have found a way, even more it was a very small team before the acquisition already supporting hundreds of MAU, promises were made there wouldn't ever be ads but of course that corporate-consolidation doesn't care about any of that.
You can't have both a paid app and an app with billions of users.
You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value.
If you want a free app that only part of users worldwide can afford there's already iMessage.
In most of the world SMS ("texting") was (or still is) a paid service per message (~5/10/20 cents per message or so, I can't remember exactly and would have to factor in inflation). But it was costly enough that people flocked to WhatsApp to avoid texting costs. Paying 1 USD or 1 EUR per year was a great deal to send unlimited texts.
> You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value.
WhatsApp had payments (or a pilot) pre-acquisiton. At $1/year, it was an amazing value proposition even for those earning $1/day. IIRC, this was when WhatsApp had 3-500M users globally. Interestingly, they allowed people to pay the subscription on behalf of a contact, so the Indonesian expat in Australia could pay for friends and family in Indonesia, and the aervice could have reached a bullion users and 500M/year revenue with about 200 employees
Did you know people below the poverty line would by $20 S40 feature phones just to be able to run WhatsApp? The other 2G phones cost less than half that amount, but you had to pay $0.1-$0.2 per SMS sent, in that light, spending $1 per year for WhatsApp's unlimited messages on a PAYG data package was a steal.
So no, I am not nuts, you just didn't think through the value proposition.
Network effects, similar to present-day Facetime in the US. There's Zoom and Google Meet, but if your family and friends are already FaceTiming, you're pressured into buying a iDevice.
There's a surprisingly number of people whose usage of the Internet is exclusively through WhatsApp, and may not even know what a "browser" is or how to use it to get in touch with their contacts.
Nonsense, it was very popular in my low-income country even back then. They charged something like half a day of income of a manual laborer per year, and everybody was happy to pay since it made your life so much easier. Of course, there's no going back now that everybody is accustomed to using it "for free".
If you read other top-level comments, you'll find that many people are simply allergic to paying for software. A lot of people don't have cards or even bank accounts so it's just not possible.
It replaced SMS, which was costly, so the deal was pretty clear. Back in those days people were quite aware of SMS prices and 1 EUR/year to replace SMS was a no brainer. It was very popular despite the price. For many people, it was the only app they actually bought.
Sure. Which would easilly pay the actual operating costs of a messaging platform
However that’s in a world where you don’t pay people tens of billions of dollars for building a relatively simple messaging platform who manage to get the network lock-in.
The next one to enshittify will be Threads. Right now it's in the honeymoon stage where there aren't any ads so people are encouraged to use it and help grow the platform.
I used Threads for the first day. And seeing occasionally promo pics that James Gunn posts of Superman. But from my ancedotal experience, Threads is already full of bots, escort services, and random tweeters who I have no interesting in following. I feel Threads might be shut down eventually or integrated into Instagram perhaps.
> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws
Network effects are much much smaller for messaging apps vis-a-vis social networks because there is no problem in incrementally moving your DMs from one place to another.
There is no switching involved, you can have two apps installed at the same time. It's not a social network where posting to one means the people posting on the other won't see your stuff.
When I did it, because my phone supports multiple apps being installed at the same time, I was able to do it gradually. Most people I know do have a second option to reach them so it wasn't a problem at all.
That already happened in EU with trying to force leading communications platforms to integrate with at least one competitor. I remember an initiative to make WhatsApp integrate with (wait for it..) Skype.
