WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

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.

> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services

Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%

I don't know, I expect it to be at least %3 as this is the general conversion rate for "free" users AFAIK.

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.

you're being too generous, as if people were on whatsbook because of a value they get.

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

Yeah, nobody uses Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Google anymore now that they’re “ad-ridden”

none of those are blasting "encryption! only you can read your messages" as their main message and marketing.

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

Whatsapp is messaging-focused, but I'm willing to bet the quotation you just gave is not even 10% of the reason people choose to use it.

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.