WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services.

It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.

Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%

There must be some some number that makes it viable to have free users and paid users. For games, the free users are usually those who provide the "content".

People usually demonize freemium games but IMHO its much more benign than extracting huge sums by artificially making it worse and sell attention.

they are just there for the captive network effect, which will take a hit the second or becomes a freemium or ad ridden service.

The problem is Whatsapp is a closed ecosystem so unlike email we can't just buy a provider.

And I do pay for youtube. The experience is well worth it and I'm thankful I can afford it (it's not a lot but many can't).

I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.

Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?

The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.

And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.

All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.

Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power

Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability...

[1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform

I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.

That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.

The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].

[1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843

Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate.

I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product".

In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.

As for the darkest of dark patterns - give Adobe some money and see what happens.

That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction:

- credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor.

- in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones)

- bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts

- crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions

- pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend

In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started.

Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.

It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humiliate themselves, they will spend sleepless nights, they will willingly enslave themselves, they will wither away in sickness, they will murder millions in the most cruel way imaginable.

All for "free".

Societies in our history were not arranged in the same way around money, because probably there was some knowledge of the two-sided curse of avarice and stinginess. I'm talking about medieval and post-medieval society, where most people didn't use or have money in their everyday life. Instead they had duties.

So I think I got that...

Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost.

Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly. This means that the price it would be it would cost would need to be 42% above than its ad ARPU just to break even.

So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users.

Meta stopped reporting user numbers/CPMs by geography after the market freaked out when user growth plateaued in the US (because they'd acquired basically everyone).

In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.

Depends on the price.

I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier.

WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook:

* https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/

Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).

The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying.

But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.

What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.

But the capital inflow is also because there is a lot of consumer spending in the US to convert.

YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos.

Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?

(I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019)

From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying.

A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.

B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get the reminders that the account was going to expire, and then on the day of, it would silently extend the account and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd pay next time.

Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a US country for a large number of people, b) there are countries with significant number of people living on a dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger.

I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming payments are even over the year (probably not a good assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple years though), or less than 10%.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...

Essentially, youtube adds more video every single day than the entirety of every other streaming service offers combined.

Youtube is in it's own category, and it's unsurprising no else wants to touch it.

But everybody has to start somewhere. Would it be impossible for Netflix to start adding for example 100 000 hours of user generated video per day?

Youtube is also moving into that direction.

Providers would be more than happy to sell Netflix the build out

So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"

I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.

I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive).

At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded.

In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course).

I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.

Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are physically there in person with someone to yell at and imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you what you want

What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery.

I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.

Huh, is that what it was... I had a Windows Phone 2012-2013 and I think I signed up for WhatsApp on it and I remember chatting with a friend on it and he was talking about the $1 per year thing and I went to check, and it said I have lifetime and I was confused how I ended up with that, but was using it so lightly that I didn't bother to look into why. I figured maybe there was a promotion the day I signed up or something.

But I feel a better example of paying for convenience is the Twitch subscriber system. They make it work in a way that others fail at by tying it in to various things like emotes and channel points and the general sense of supporting the creators. I know YT memberships exist, but I don't know how widely those are used and they just don't seem to get pushed as much.

Europe though, yeah they’re killing it.

I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to.

If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.

If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.

There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.

Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.

I wouldn’t pay Meta or similar companies for messaging services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.

Literally on the first link I clicked on on cbs the advertiser somehow figured out how to make my browser redirect to some super-sketchy site saying I was the 5 billionth google search and won blah blah blah.

Browsing without adblock is an unacceptable security risk so long as google et all refuse to audit and comprehensively secure the code they demand to run on my laptop.

I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties.

> who actually pays for YT Premium.

Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?"

Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.

Some of us actually paid for WhatsApp! I think it was about $1 a year when it launched. At the time it was providing significant value, especially in areas where cross-border communication was common.

I'm sure $1 isn't enough to cover costs anymore but someone could make a nice living charging $5-10 a month for something similar. The problem is people will always sell out to investors and fuck over their users. It's inevitable.

Which is why many of them say things like "skip these ads if you like Im not getting any of it" or "Im here primarily for exposure, I make my money elsewhere".

That's because the core product is not anywhere near worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can filter or search for content, or how I can search for new content. History of both videos and comments are effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably search or archive.

It's not a service so much as it is a copyright clearinghouse.

If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade the free experience to convince you.

To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be more palatable. The problem is nobody will pay as long as the tech behemoths are offering the same thing for free.

Sure, it’s easy to get some 20 or 30-something year old with a cushy 6 figure salary to pay 20 USD or similar per month for some digital service (esp. when they are building some digital service themselves, so they know what it entails). For someone strugling to make ends meet, there’s many higher priority things than some digital service when there’s free alternatives, let alone email.

And your privacy concerns? In my experience, absolutely non-existent in the real world. Actually I only ever hear about them in HN, not even my software development coworkers. Just the other day there was some raffle where there was some weekend trip to somewhere as a prize, but you had to give all your personal details, there was a big queue, they would’ve given their blood type details (if not literally a few ccs of their blood) and told them all about their kinkiest fantasy if they’d asked for it. Literally, I’m not joking.

People are curious creatures indeed.

One day the app asked me to pay. It was less than 1 Euro per year, I think. I never associated a credit card to the app store (Android) so I did not pay and waited to see what would happen.

It kept asking for money for a few days but it kept working, so I thought they were not serious about it. Then it stopped asking. It started asking for money again after a few months but I remembered what happened before so I waited again. It kept working and eventually stopped asking for money. This pattern repeated a few times until maybe the time FB bought it.

I believe that if it stopped working people would have switched en masse to another app, maybe Telegram? We also had Viber and probably FB messenger too.

Switches happened many times in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember AIM, ICQ, MSN, then Skype. Whole networks of people moved to the next one or used more than one to message different friends. WhatsApp never had a chance to earn money directly from its users IMHO.

I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).

Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ...

If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.

I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very natural nowadays.

I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate.

Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard.

[1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway

But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.

I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube.

Probably not watch.

I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience.

When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it.

Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails.

Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.

Whats the point of paid, premium service like Spotify if I keep being served those stupid, dishonest and bordeline illegally deceiving Shopify ads every 15 minutes.

While I don't love my money going to Google, I find YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have always been able to download it without much trouble.

Flight comparators don't show "avaliable legroom" in their metrics.

As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more.

Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0].

On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee.

[0] https://youtu.be/8-pJa11YvCs?t=952

1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors.

2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise.

3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements.

I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience.

Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars.

What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.

It's the friction of paying for something at all. There is no free sandwich, so people don't generally expect it, on the other hand there's plenty of free software.

In my anecdotal experience, the people complaining about leg room are precisely those who are not paying for additional leg room. (Similar to how people who compare modern air travel with service in the 1960s aren't purchasing the inflation-adjusted equivalent ticket, which would almost always be a lay-flat seat today if not Wheels Up.)

How to you qualify the comfort of a seat with 20cm of legroom vs 30cm? Until we have a quality metric for flights that's also a single number we can't.

I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions.

We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.

They don’t create nor curate much content.

I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.

Strangely, some of my colleagues have 'paid' (work's money, their time) extra to avoid Ryanair, when Ryanair has the only direct connection. This I find strange.

Given the choice, I've long paid a little more if it means an Airbus plane, as I think the cabin is quieter. However, that's rarely shown on flight booking sites.

those are literal public forums people go to expose themselves. you don't have a very good point.

But then to book directly and get the "guaranteed cheapest!" price, I have to sort through even more options than on an aggregator, I have to create an account, and now I'm getting spammed from ANOTHER entity I never plan to do business with again. At least with the aggregators I have one company whose privacy settings I've already dealt with.

Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.

With the fee to remove advertising, you'd need to use all the price discrimination tricks to maximize revenue. E.g., have sales, have discount codes, etc., and it would still not be close to the price discrimination possible via ads.

I also wonder what the income of OP's bubble was when they were not paying for WhatsApp.

IIRC, you had to have signed up with windows phone, switching phones to windows phone wouldn't grant you lifetime (switching to iPhone while the app was paid on iOS would; a delay on that was added to avoid abuse of borrow your friend's iPhone, re-register and then switch back).

Absolute bullshit.

I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads.

I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing.

Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver.

https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...

Internet is a paid service.

When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential.

Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services.

The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.

The scales of the two models are very different. Ingesting content is more complicated with user generated content because there's few guarantees about formats (encoding, color, file formats). Serving the content is also more complicated because it's not as friendly to edge caches as studio content. Part of the expense of YouTube is the long tail of content. Popular content might live in edge caches but YouTube serves up old unpopular stuff too.

Can I ask why Spain specifically?

the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but having been through my fair share of attempting contract cancellations this isn't surprising.

I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize the larger attention base.

Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's historically been more inclined to do things that were worse for growth, but better for users when they had more of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore.

Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone users continue to move to WhatsApp.

I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.

The US never had a high user count, but it was chosen because US tech journalism sets the narrative. If you want people to pay around the world, convince US tech journalists that payment enforcement is on, and the knowledge that you need to pay filters through the world in a way that it doesn't by just enforcing payment in Spain.

See also: the invisibility of Nokia phones when they pissed off US carriers with SIP clients and left the US market; despite being the top selling phone manufacture of both feature phones and smart phones, there were no media stories about them.

> Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat.

Google also had the opportunity to do this. Around the same time iMessage launched, Google made Hangouts the default SMS app on Android with a similar capability to upgrade to Internet-based messaging when all parties to a conversation had it. Hangouts was cross-platform. Rumor has it carriers whined and Google caved.

I'm kind of glad Google doesn't have a dominant messaging service, but it's only true due to their own lack of commitment.

This would not be true most places outside of the USA and maybe Canada. In a few countries/regions it might be a different third-party messaging app.

There's no way they actually earned $500M/year. Even if Whatsapp had 100 employees making $200k/year on average, that's $20M on salaries. Add an another very generous $80M on infra/admin etc costs and they'd have been making $400M profit. With that much profit achieved within such a short period, in the QE funny money era they could have IPO'd at $50-100 billion easily.

(1) https://www.pipersandler.com/teens

I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.

Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.

Went to South Africa on vacation last year. United lost our luggage on the first leg of the trip, which then became South African Airways responsibility to sort out because they handled our final leg.

I communicated directly with the SAA baggage agent over WhatsApp. Then communicated over WhatsApp with the courier delivering our bags . Best customer service ever.

Whereas Whatsapp was simple - only phone numbers to sign up, only text and images, only mobile phones. That simplicity meant my parents could onboard smoothly and operate it without having to navigate a maze of UX. I literally saw Whatsapp winning in real time vs Hangouts and other alternatives.

Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point).

People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know."

SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."

I used Hangouts for a while and had a bunch of contacts on it when it was Android's default SMS app. Many of them were not particularly technical, including one of my parents whom I don't recall telling to use it. If you were using an Android phone, you were probably already logged in to a Google account. iPhone users had to work a little harder for it (install the app and remember the password to the Gmail account they probably already had).

I don't recall the UX on the mobile client having extra complexity over other messaging apps if I didn't go digging in the settings, but it's been a while.

If I understand it correctly, people use it mainly because MMS was a dumpster fire and WA was the first platform which got critical mass in most countries, which it achieved by being both pretty good overall and by being cross-platform.

The encryption is a nice bonus that everybody likes, but you can't prove that is a primary or even major reason why plumbers in India, tour guides in Dubai, and school parent groups in the US all choose to communicate with it, personally and professionally. If anything, I feel like Signal must have by now poached a good number of the people whose main concern is "How encrypted is it?"

Also, Gmail is not a public forum and people don't mind that it's 'ad-ridden' either.

I see this and not see this.

See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason.

not see = Steam

There are many people I run across who bypassed the whole Gmail and Google Workspace ecosystems and have rolled along merrily with me.com and other email providers.

It's not a given that users will have bothered to register for a Google account unless they grew up in the Bay Area after a certain time period.

Wind back the clock to when Google tried to roll out Hangouts and the Gmail penetration rate was even lower among the non-Android users out there.

But paying a fair price for a service which has actual value for you is not "unchecked". That's sieving flies and swallowing camels.

I used to... like some app, paid for a "PRO" version to get additonal features. Everything was ok.

Then 6 months went by, and they added a cloud feature, to upload some stuff and configs and sync between devices, and it turned from one time payment to a subscription plan. Then built-in features got moved into the cloud, and previously working stuff didn't work without subscriptions anymore. Then they added ads. PRO has maybe 2 more features than a free version and no nag screen at the start, and that's it.

This is all anecdotal of course. Maybe it wouldn't have worked, but how quickly they gave up was weird.

Incidentally, this is also the reason, as much as I would like to, for not donating to public/non-profit organizations. Anybody who has donated to a political party or an organization like ACLU would know what I am talking about...

Ads money is larger than user buying subscription they don't want you to buy software lol

My understanding is games with microtransactions optimise for "whales", people who spend inordinate amounts of money. While the majority of users don't pay anything, or at most very little.

If everything goes the way of ads and (for lack of a better term) enshittification, could consumer attitudes change?

It is though. Videos with "limited ads" (as it's technically called in YouTube Studio) applied to them still get paid out of Premium views.

Hangouts UX sucked big time. I remember lots of frustrating sessions with my parents about why video calls weren't going through, or how can some random family member join our family thread when they don't have a Gmail account etc.

Even mediocre food is still functional, and usually still enjoyable.

Quite a lot of paid software does not meet that bar. It's far more likely to both cost you money and waste a few hours (much longer than that food demanded, unless you got food poisoning).

I generally agree it's far out of balance, but I do think it's broadly understandable.

Even then the second most profitable line of business for airlines are credit cards and the banks who buy miles in bulk for their customers. Of course this is a US perspective.

The ad-free one doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU. There’s a pretty reasonable argument to be made that social media services with near-ubiquitous uptake should be regulated as utilities, and regulators could reasonably place the price at cost + a marginal profit margin as determined to be reasonable, like they do for other utilities that are privately-owned.

> Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly.

They don’t have to offer paid subscriptions via IAP.

FB does - “Meta Verified” for $16/month (presumably different depending on locale), but the benefits aren’t very good. (A verified badge, Increased account protection, Enhanced support, Upgraded profile features, Bonus stars and stickers)

That's not even remotely close to being true. Plenty of people would order a $25 dish at a place and not like it. Not finishing the dish, or throwing a way a half eaten candy bar or bad-tasting-$6-cup of coffee is very normal. Plenty of (if most) food is meh or not enjoyable. It just serves a purpose and fills you and you move on.

I believe they are rolling out audio ads.

Sure. But is it the same Google account that your relatives email you on, or a different one that only that phone is using? When you drop this phone are you going to sign into that same Google account or make a new one? The answers for non-technical users are non-obvious.

What's your secret? Even the hotel in privacy-conscious Austria I stayed with once four years ago spams me.

> booking with the hotel lets me select options not available on booking sites like king vs 2 queen bed options, ADA compliant rooms and even floor options

If their booking system works. Usually faster and more reliable to send a message on booking.com.

> if you have AAA or some other memberships, those codes can easily beat discount sites like Booking.com

Maybe if your time is worthless.

It's probably at least irresponsible to not block ads for an elderly parent who's starting to experience cognitive decline.

i don't think people join because it's encrypted, but they wouldn't use when it's not. it too can became the dumpsterfire that sms was/is.

It’s not even a blanket statement on software. gamers have shown they are willing to pay, though their money comes with strings attached. Mac users are more willing to pay than Windows users who are more willing to pay than Linux users.

My mental image of it is looking at Apple when the iPhone was 2 or 3 years old, and today's Apple: its current size dwarfs the Apple of back in the days, but it wasn't some small also-ran company, it's impact on the whole industry was still pretty big.

AppsFlyer's data on this was interesting, while not straightforward to interpret from our angle.

https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/app-marketing-mo...

And software often requires you to enter payment info into who know what system (plus your phone number (plus make an account (plus opt into receiving spam from them until the universe dies))), if you're not using google play / the iOS app store. In a restaurant you put your card into the thing and you're done.

Also this:

>It just serves a purpose and fills you and you move on.

Is something many pieces of software I've used cannot even dream of achieving. They solely wasted my time.

It's why I think it's a shame that demos are a dying breed.

But the difference is that food elicits cravings - you buy it because you imagine how good it'll be if it's done right this time and your body pressures you to buy it. Apps don't do that.

Now, this market probably isn’t going to put you in the Fortune 500, but is enough to run a profitable business.

That being said, lately YT has way too many ads for my liking; thus I am using Reddit more and more for these things.

But since I have the option to not pay, I don't. If it was paywalled I'd be willing to pay probably 3-5x what a normal streaming service charges though.

You definitely had a rougher experience with it than I did, but my main point is Google launched it, didn't seriously iterate on it, and gave up its strongest distribution channel at the first sign of pressure from carriers. Since they keep launching messaging products, I must conclude they want to be in that space and it was foolish of them to squander their best opportunity.

Do you use any free (as in no money comes out of your wallet) services today? If so, which ones?

If somebody has never purchased an app, setting up payments in the app might be seen as “too much work, especially just for this one app”. But once you get the payments in there, each subsequent 0.99 payment is painless

Youtube music is fine-ish. Search is pretty weak and prefers recommendations over results. The controls for playlist Play, Play with Shuffle, and Play with Autoadd are fairly confusing especially between the app and the desktop version. Creating and managing multiple playlists is a frustrating experience and not thought out at all. It constantly feeling the need to change the album art on my playlists.

You pay to not be annoyed. You're not paying for a "premium" product in any way.

I genuinely do not know how to get a refund from the google play store or the apple equivalent.

(The downside of the Steam policy is it makes Steam unviable for games that can be played in full very quickly. Develops can also game the system by dragging out early game so the player is over the refundable time by the time they reach the rough parts. But this is for another discussion.)

The idea of trading something valuable for an abstract piece of software or paper is still not really natural to us, and is a learned behavior.

Apps and the internet in general, for most people, is considered almost weightless and zero cost. In the race for market dominance meant dropping the price as low as possible to drive out competition.

Hacker news has 5 million monthly unique users [1].

Given how hacker news constantly complain about google’s decline and the constant virtue signaling on the need to pay for software, you would expect a sizable chunk of the users (the vocal ones, at least) here pay for Kagi. And yet we are here. GP is absolutely right about it being all-talk.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140

You can pay FB to serve your ads too. We're not talking about those things.

The idea of paid, premium service with ads is ridiculous.

It's the case for messaging apps and for almost any other kind of app. It's hard to beat the price point of a free app, even if it might include tracking, advertising, spying inside their package.

If WhatsApp would start asking for money hundreds of millions of people would switch to something else in a few days, even to a free app created overnight to capitalize on the opportunity.

1. I think folks would be naturally more skeptical of the government than they are of big tech, ideally leading to E2EE for email that's usable by the masses.

2. Phishing and scams could have a dedicated law enforcement arm (Postal Inspectors).

3. We'd reduce the amount of email-based personal data being mined and turned into entirely unregulated ad-tech nightmares.

Source? I always thought this was a general Steam policy, as it's available pretty much anywhere.

I think it’s actually worldwide?

But then again I would likely opt out of Hangouts, so it’s not a problem.

(I think? I'm not very well-versed in Twitch stuff)

Funny because now it doesn't. It routinely fails to surface emails that exist.

They also issue bonds which is another fun way to collect money.

    > Plenty of university students around me who will order a $8 boba tea

[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2011/83/oj#art_9.tit_1

There's no desktop app for YouTube Music for starters.

I can't speak to anywhere else, but these[0][1] are near Columbia University and $8 is pretty normal there, AFAICT. Presumably YMMV depending on where you are.

[0] https://order.gongchausa.com/

[1] https://www.trycaviar.com/store/tea-magic-new-york-841338/11...

That is so weird to me. "Institutions that exist for the sole purpose of serving the people might end up having some power, so let's instead give it all to the literal oligarchs."

I dont like that while the ad revenue barely extracts a dollar from me, my subscription suddenly expects $10-30 per month regardless of my usage.

Thats not "we need to charge you to continue our services", thats "we need to charge you and then 20x times again just because we can".

This is true. One thing I note is that with the same dollar amount, you get even less legroom, luggage, etc. today than you used to back 10-15 years ago on traditional airlines. Granted the airline costs rose over time, but it's hard to imagine they went up to the scale traditional airfare has increased at equivalent service levels... Also the fact that things that used to be included are now considered "extra" looks like a good excuse for folks to complain about.

I'm German, so I'm basing my statement on almost 34 years of living here. In case you want some more details from an actual bank, read this [1].

Basically, we don't need credit cards, not even for renting cars, because we have robust regulation and our own national cashless payment schemes plus SEPA. Direct debit is just fine for us.

[1] https://n26.com/en-de/blog/taboo-of-credit

I still see a lot of people who are afraid of purchasing on the internet and give out their card number. My mother in law ask her daughters to call her a uber when she needs one because she is afraid of installing the app and giving her credit card number[1]. Yet she has all the social medias installed on her smartphone.

[1] The irony is she apparently don't care the her own daughters would have to take that risk for her.

* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)

* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)

> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.

> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.

> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.

Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...

I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...

Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...

But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.

Very noticeable when using custom domain and emails where I might sign up to the same service several times.

Here in europe every club/association/group has a whatsapp group chat. For instance here since the official app provided by the government has a super clunky UX most people get information from primary school through a whatsapp group chat managed by the parent's representative who has exclusive access to teaching group.

Steam experience is closer to the feel of ownership because: - Most games don't just randomly upgrade. They are stable. - Steam is cross platform enough that you can use the software on different devices as if you were copying it. - Your steam account isn't the center of your digital life, it's access isn't subject to many associated risks.

I can't think of a single reason I'd want/need a standalone app over having the Chrome version of the app, which to all intents and purposes appears as a standalone app anyway.

So I'm curious, what's the use-case for a Desktop App to stream music? Even with the webapp you can download music for offline play.

Personal take on it: that's all just preparing children for the inevitable fact that everything from education over employment and housing to dating is mostly depending on luck...

Meanwhile, I get half a day free in Gdansk or Budapest or wherever while my colleague wanders around Munich Airport.

I usually do that and it works for a lot of things, but small hotels are one of the things that seems to slip through. And even when it works, I still resent having to do it at all, and would rather book via a big aggregator where I've already done the unsubscribe years ago.

Are you willing to pay more for your subscription so that Spotify can also pay podcasters? Because that's what you are asking, it won't ever be able to dilute even more the royalties pot, you'd need to pay more for your subscription so that podcasters can also be paid.

Just because you're paying for a service doesn't mean your data won't get sold and monetized, nor does it protect you from ads getting shoved down your throat. ISPs and mobile phone service providers both sell your data. It's a common practice for services to keep raising prices and introduce ad-supported tiers in order to squeeze pay-piggies as much as possible.

Any time someone has tried starting a service that competed with big tech it either gets bought out or ripped off. And big tech's infinitely deep pockets means they can run at a loss for years until all the competition has disappeared.

I think in order to truly solve these problems it will require legislation and breaking up big tech into smaller companies. We also need legislation to require tech companies to stop creating walled gardens that cannot integrate with other platforms.

Or do you mean how Google implemented its ads?

couldn’t believe they had fallen for an April fools.

But that was a limited time window when gmail massively outweighed the 10-20mbit of things like hotmail with effectively unlimited storage.

The average company would rather charge that 1 cent and still show adverts. We see that time and again.

This is not true.

New drama club my youngest has joined only sends messages out on Facebook, which is even worse.

o_O

Unfortunately that would still exclude plenty of good apps. There are a ton which are “free” with limited options and then have a one-time in-app purchase to unlock the full thing.

This would cost $350M/year to Europe [1] -- which is a drop of the ocean in their budget -- in exchange for control of information.

Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

[1] assuming the initial business model of whatsapp was cash neutral, which I think it was

Apps (“software”) and games are fundamentally different in the public’s perception. Look at the App Store, it has two different tabs for games and Apple is even making a separate app for them.

The explicit rule is you can get a refund on any game for any reason if both of these are true:

* You have played for less than two hours.

* You bought it in the past two weeks.

https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

This was over a decade ago, so may be very outdated. I don’t even think in-app purchases were yet a thing. I wasn’t trying to abuse the apps (I pay for software) and was in fact trying to use the refund policy to allow me to buy more apps because I could test without the fear of paying for duds. Their policy had the opposite effect and I basically stopped buying on the App Store.

Gmail's promise of 1GB free storage was an incredible offer at those times, where many people used "paid" mailers. Paid as part of the Internet subscription with a worse Webmailer and less storage than Google provided.

It is especially complicated with Mail, where Anti-Spam measures make operating an own server work (on one side for filtering incoming mail, on the other side to prevent being blocked for spamming)

Why are you using that as an example, and not asking how many people pay for their cellular data plan?

International payments are a huge huge goddamn mess and I do not envy anyone who has to deal with their peculiarities.

Yes, but not necessarily MasterCard/Visa debit cards. Germany's Girocard for example is a national debit card scheme that does not use any of the American grifters. Unfortunately, it's being phased out in favor of MC/Visa because the EU fee cap on national schemes is much lower than for MC/Visa and so banks can make more money off of you.

We're just standing by and watch our dependence on American grifter megacompanies larger every day.

* phone

* email

* whatsapp, because others use it

* signal, because it's actually good

* telegram, because that one group is on it

* my todo list app

* duolingo

* a good mapping app without ads

... and so on. And the same for my kids. And before you blink, you suddenly pay several hundred dollars per month.

Aka the slippery slope.

One of the problems seems to be that everything comes with transaction costs, so for example Signal cannot easily charge me a single dollar per month, which I suspect is a price point that would work for both me and them (if every one of their users paid it).