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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

(www.nytimes.com)
713 points greenburger | 1 comments | 16 Jun 25 13:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Daisywh ◴[17 Jun 25 07:13 UTC] No.44296461[source]▶
I remember switching to WhatsApp many years ago, mainly because it had no ads and encrypted chats, while other apps were constantly crammed with ads and features I didn't need. Now I feel like I'm slowly going back to that old path. Sometimes it really feels like no app can really stay clean for long.
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tigroferoce ◴[17 Jun 25 07:24 UTC] No.44296520[source]▶
I think this is two sided topic:

- on one side there is the increasing number of features in WhatsApp that nobody asked for and that make the experience worse and worse, I agree. Yet, on the other side of the world a 1B people in China use WeChat for so many things beside communicating, so I understand Meta's appetite to become the West WeChat. Still I hate it. - on the other side there is the business model of WhatsApp. Or the complete lack of it. It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free. These things are expensive and they need to be monetized.

It's either ads, either fees on extra services they are providing through the app, either a monthly subscription. Now, I think nobody would pay for WhatsApp and they would lose their market immediately if they went that route (for many good reasons). They tried hard to position WhatsApp as WeChat, failing at that (for many good reasons). Ads is the only thing that is left IMO.

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palata ◴[17 Jun 25 07:30 UTC] No.44296554[source]▶
> It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free.

What about Signal? It seems like they run on donations, don't they?

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tigroferoce ◴[17 Jun 25 07:56 UTC] No.44296700[source]▶
True, but they are a much smaller service. I remember that WhatsApp was designed to be lean and very efficient so that it would run on a small number of servers.

But this it different from a highly profitable service. Let's keep in mind that Meta payed 19B for WhatsApp in 2014. They need a juicy ROI.

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1. palata ◴[17 Jun 25 08:56 UTC] No.44297036[source]▶
> True, but they are a much smaller service.

I wonder how it scales. It is an order of magnitude smaller but it's not exactly "small": I read it had 70M users in 2024. If you can relay messages between 70M messages without storing metadata, it feels like it shouldn't be too hard to scale, right?

Not sure if they get enough donations, but assuming they do: with 10x the number of users, if they get 10x the donations, it feels like it may work.

> Meta payed 19B for WhatsApp in 2014. They need a juicy ROI.

I think they paid for the metadata (I know that back then it wasn't E2EE but they moved to the Signal protocol in 2016), and now they are just enshittifying.

I have seen criticisms of Signal's crypto stuff (which I just disabled) and trademark, but I don't get it. It's okay to not use the crypto stuff (I personally don't like it) as long as it doesn't clutter the UI. Sponsored content says "for those who like this feature, they will now see ads". It's pretty different from saying "if you don't like the feature, don't use it", IMHO.