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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

(www.nytimes.com)
713 points greenburger | 7 comments | 16 Jun 25 13:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.959s | source | bottom
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mrtksn ◴[16 Jun 25 14:07 UTC] No.44289633[source]▶
Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services?

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.

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1. doix ◴[16 Jun 25 14:15 UTC] No.44289718[source]▶
I remember WhatsApp costing money, 1$ per year or per lifetime or something. I paid for it, I think it was a WinRar situation though, where deleting and reinstalling the app gave it to you for free or something.

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.

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2. A_Duck ◴[16 Jun 25 14:21 UTC] No.44289779[source]▶
Yep I paid for Whatsapp, I've even dug out the receipt email. I want my £0.79 back!
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3. mschuster91 ◴[16 Jun 25 14:22 UTC] No.44289796[source]▶
Pre acquisition Whatsapp had 450M users. Even accounting for half the revenue of 1$ going away for payment fees (30%) and taxes (20%), that would still have been a nice cushy 200 million $ a year in almost pure profit - WA had 55 (!) employees at acquisition and 550 servers [1].

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

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4. paxys ◴[16 Jun 25 14:35 UTC] No.44289962[source]▶
That fee wasn't really enforced. I was in India at the time and no one paid because no one had credit cards tied to their account. Everyone still used WhatsApp just fine.
5. Ekaros ◴[16 Jun 25 14:47 UTC] No.44290093[source]▶
Three years of WhatsApp service for phone just 2,67$... In 2015...

So I think I got that...

6. roryirvine ◴[16 Jun 25 16:29 UTC] No.44291062[source]▶
Other way round. Facebook bought them in 2014, and they dropped the fee in early 2016.

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.

7. RestlessMind ◴[16 Jun 25 23:51 UTC] No.44294405[source]▶
I was on Android back then and never paid for Whatsapp. Neither did any of my family or friends who used Android phones back in 2012-13