WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

Pay for services that you use instead of forcing companies to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service?

I get it though, no one wants to pay for 100s of little free marginally useful things we use every day, but if you look back at what whatsapp did in the beginning, the £3 a year they were asking is so worth it

at the beginning, they "charged" $1 (or £3 as you said), but this "fee" was often just waived. You never really had to pay it to use whatsapp. The money was there as a form of advertising, to differentiate whatsapp from the others - because by making it seem more premium via attaching a price, it makes the people using it feel more superior and thus the platform more easily propagates; and it's also why they "secretly" let you use it for free if you refused to pay.

I remember when it was 1€/year. Absolutely totally worth it! And I'd gladly pay again if they would only let me!

This fails to account for network effects, where most people are already using a specific messaging app and people are unable to migrate elsewhere without sacrificing a ton of contacts. Even if someone is willing to pay, that won't magically transfer over their contacts.

In order to truly solve this problem there has to be some kind of federation and cross-platform standards so that alternatives are able to rise up and compete with big tech.

I guess it feels worth it if you actually like it.

I've always hated WhatsApp but use it due to network effect: in my country you pretty much can't have a normal social life without it (and even things like customer service often use it as well).

When they started threatening with charging money, it felt like a punch to the gut. So I'm using this product I hate because I'm pretty much forced, as I'd rather be using Telegram or various others that I strongly prefer, and now that they've captured entire societies and communities with their free app, they're going to make ME pay?

My feeling is that capitalism is just not a good model for messaging apps with network effects. Regulation is sorely needed, at the very least for interoperability (like the phone network), and maybe more.

> forcing them to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service?

Corporate advocates love to whine about cost yet seem to be blind to the context of the situation.

Meta captures enough of the entire global spend on ad revenue to be considered the biggest player in ads, yet we should spare sympathy for the poor servers of whatsapp - famously optimised to scale to 1B users with 50 engineers - which are now compelled to resort to inserting ads in order to cover the costs to run operations and keep the lights on.

These users just don't want to pay for anything, shame on them for using free services subsidised by massive corporations that undercut the market with the explicit aim of expanding the audience and clawing it back later. It's not Meta / Whatsapp's fault that they're exploiting this situation they've shrewdly developed over years, it's the individual moral failing of each user of the service.

Meanwhile ragebait / propaganda / angry racist uncle news is free on Facebook and shared in various forms, and meaningful news + journalism is locked behind various paywalls and other costs. Why won't these people just pay???

Oh my God, thank you SO MUCH for this comment.

Nah. I only use WhatsApp because friends and acquaintances of mine use it. I have NEVER had the need to send a video, nor a photo to anyone. I would be totally happy using iMessage or even SMS. The ONLY reason I have WhatsApp installed is peer pressure. No need for any of its features. No need to pay for it either.

FWIW, £3 is closer to $4.

It felt a little weird that they didn't differentiated pricing. Charging 1€ is adds a little to much overhead per transaction, and maybe not everyone has a credit card. It seems to me that an alternative would be to charge e.g. 5, 10 maybe even 20€ per year in western countries, then step the amount down depending on the economy in each region, bottoming out at e.g. 5€. Then just let the app be free in the rest of the world.

That way a user in Europe could "subsidize" 4-10 users in the developing world. Maybe that's a little to social democratic for a corporation.

Agreed, iMessage and SMS are both free, so why would I pay for WhatsApp again? With RCS starting to work better, I don't really see a need for 3rd. party messaging apps. I do like Signal, but honestly I don't have a need for it.

in a lot of countries not called America / Western Europe SMS costs are high. Hence why Whatsapp took off. Even phone calls there's nothing called unlimited mins / unlimted sms everything is metered - off-net / on-net data sold by bundles etc with some carriers you can even buy whatsapp "bundle" where you can access whatsapp but not regular data

They will make so much more than 1€/year/user with (y)our data.

SMS is definitely not free. You may have a bundle that includes X (or unlimited) amount of SMS, but there are plenty of subscriptions out there (maybe not in the US) that charge by the SMS, or come with bundles of only having, say, 50 free SMS per month.

In all fairness, no one uses SMS, and no one uses iMessage (outside of the US maybe?).

WhatsApp is omnipresent in Singapore. For example, every business, every support channel, every delivery company uses WhatsApp. WhatsApp QR codes are everywhere (similar to QQ/wechat in CN).

Most iPhone users I know in Singapore never even set up their iMessage (which is also only available on iOS and is a total pain to get to work if you're dabbling in various sim cards, as is very common in SEA). So yes, there's a very good reason WhatsApp is very popular in some parts of the world (similar to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) until quite recently in Indonesia). It's become too big to fail and took over a very very big portion of (private/business) communication in many parts of the world. And it 100% needs more regulation.

I think your chronology is wrong.

It is extremely unlikely that you used WhatsApp "before they started threatening with charging money" but would have preferred Telegram at the time.

Why?

1. Because WhatsApp was a paid app from the beginning ($0.99 after the first year of using it)

2. Because WhatsApp was bought by FB in early 2014, who made it free.

3. Because Telegram was founded in late 2013

I have bad memory in general, but of this in particular, I'm very sure. Because I remember that some people actually switched to Telegram upon receiving the message saying they had to pay before some deadline or they would lose access to WhatsApp, and I thought "at least this is a silver lining, some people are switching to Telegram".

I also distinctly remember that I didn't pay by the deadline (although I planned to cave in later) but finally the threat didn't materialize and I didn't lose access (or maybe I did, but for a day or two). Some people did pay and didn't get any advantage over those of us who didn't.

This was in Spain, so maybe the issue is that the specifics vary per country. In particular, I think your point 1 wasn't really true here. WhatsApp monopolized messaging (including even elderly population) because it was free. You wouldn't convince most people here (and especially the elderly) to pay for an app, it would be dead on arrival. Perhaps the charge after the first year you mention was somewhere in the official small print, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure everyone was using it under the assumption that it was free. They only tried charging a fee that single time I'm mentioning, and they backtracked fast.

It's obviously very area specific. The only difference in the subscriptions I have available is the amount of data included. They all have unlimited SMS and calls, it's been that way for years.

I do get that I'm probably in one of the few areas outside the US where iMessage is pretty big, but even then SMS (probably RCS now) is how you communicate with Android users.

It also doesn't chance the fact that it make no sense for me to pay for e.g. WhatsApp, when I have the SMS available at no additional cost.

Not like whatsapp works decently if you have 2 sim cards… you can use 1 phone number per phone and the other one is just ignored.

Fair enough, but it keeps working with your (old) sim. iMessage deregisters every time, and it stops working for me. And you have to head back in settings and register again.

I've found the process to be very buggy and rarely works.

It's definitely not unlikely because I very clearly remember WhatsApp being a paid app from the beginning, but I also remember no one actually having to pay for it. Couldn't tell you how exactly it worked but I've used it since I was a kid to talk to my friends and family, while we didn't even know how to do online payments.