I don't remember any new feature I liked since Facebook took over. Perhaps some stuff in the group chats that I liked but that's it. So if there's some kind of momentum for another messaging app I'll jump ship early.
Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
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Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#152Aside from Signal and Telegram, is there any worthy alternative?
E-mail. It's pretty amazing.
- You are lucky of your provider does push notifications
- no presence or typing indicators
- no working end to end encryption, definitely so for group threads
- no reasonable concept of managing groups
- no standard way of quoting
- inefficient or unsafe media sharing
- insane amounts of spam
- no lightweight formatting
- no avatars
And that's just what randomly came to mind.
E-mail sucks for almost anything.
Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#153Remember when WhatsApp required a subscription? One of the first changes made by Facebook after purchasing WhatsApp was to make it available for free. And now they're complaining they can't milk it enough? Oh dear. I know that a percentage of WhatsApp users would stop using the app if they started requiring a payment again –because apparently paying $1 per year for using an application on your $999 phone is outrageou…
$1 - (2% fee + 30c card fee) leaves them with very little. I wonder how they get around the credit card fees. Supposedly Apple would want their 30% cut as well.
Say they get 30c per user.
You get 1T traffic for $1, so 300G for 30c. That's roughly 40Gbytes per year or 100Mbytes per day. As long as people are on expensive mobile plans, there won't be more data.
Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah ... but a huge fraction of Whatsapp users (in India & Africa especially) use $100 (or less) phones....
It surprises me that ad companies build their businesses around audiences who cannot afford $1/year for a useful service. I'm not suggested that people in poorer economies should be deprived of targeted advertising. It's just surprising they wield such influence. I guess they make it up in volume.
A lot of advertising is aimed at low income, low educated people because some products you still have to buy even if you are poor.
Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my perspective, any company that goes public will eventually turn to crap (or go through decades-long crap/good cycles). It's not MBAs that drive for growth at all costs - I would argue it's shareholders. Shareholders are greedy and don't care about anything else besides ROI. Even if that means throwing the consumers under the bus in the long run to achieve that.
Yeah but who do you think is pushing the company to bow to the shareholder pressure?
The legal system? Shareholders can vote to replace board members.
Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#156Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that's nothing to sneeze at. It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs,…
If the app cost $1 per year subscription, most people could afford it, but many wouldn't get their shit together and actually do the payment, and then their accounts would be suspended, and the network effect would be reduced.
And also, WhatsApp wouldn't be making a ton of money. Payment processors take a huge bite out of $1 payments, the service does cost money to run, and it costs more money to continue to develop.
A monetization model that's not a subscription allows very poor people/people who are turned off by putting in a credit card number to stay on the system, while monetizing the majority of users for a much higher per-person value, thus meaning that WhatsApp would take in higher total revenue while maintaining their network effect and ability to appeal to new users.
You can see why they want to do the latter.
Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#157Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that's nothing to sneeze at. It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs,…
Ok, I agree that some MBAs can be full of it but can we already stop this MBA hate on HN? I feel like lots of people here think that if you build something then customers will surely come. I've got a huge surprise for you. You will have to sell your product and some of the MBA's are really great at that. In B2B a single sale can make or break your company when you're low on cash. You do your job and let them do their…
Craigslist isn't playing the game and doing fine. The game is all in your head. Feels like even the IDEA that there's a game is MBA hogwash they're trying to sell you.
Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many of their current users would actually be paying $1 a year? Over the long term how many more? Most of these products want to be free. If I'm paying $1 a year to WhatsApp and see my friend using a different app without being charged for it, I feel like I'm getting screwed. I find it hard to think of WhatsApp truly being a long term product with that business model. Two, claiming encouraging more ads on your pl…
Just before WhatsApp was bought by Facebook, they were asking for that $1 per year (I remember paying it) and they had 450 million users, in spite of plenty of chat alternatives being on the market ever since the 90s. I initially ignored it then switched to it after they started to do end to end encryption and encouraged all my friends to use it, instead of Facebook’s Messenger. So yes, they were already popular beca…
> Just before WhatsApp was bought by Facebook, they were asking for that $1 per year (I remember paying it) and they had 450 million users, in spite of plenty of chat alternatives being on the market ever since the 90s.
How many of those users were actually paying at the time? IIRC they allowed 1 year of free use (even more depending on your country). I don't know what the churn is going to be the moment a currently free customer becomes paying, but it is definitely non-zero. I really don't think that is evidence for a long term sustainable business model if others exist with zero total subscription fees.
> I’m not saying that the ads model doesn’t have its place, far from it, I’m saying that WhatsApp could have lived just fine without it.
The biggest reason for WhatsApp's success was the cost of SMS messaging most international markets. That's actually declined significantly since its introduction, so that's another drag on their pricing power.
Could they have lived? Maybe. But I doubt they'd have 1.5 billion users like they do now, and I don't think they long term trajectory for the business would look sustainable charging $1 a year.
Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#159Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many of their current users would actually be paying $1 a year? Over the long term how many more? Most of these products want to be free. If I'm paying $1 a year to WhatsApp and see my friend using a different app without being charged for it, I feel like I'm getting screwed. I find it hard to think of WhatsApp truly being a long term product with that business model. Two, claiming encouraging more ads on your pl…
The power of mass usage comes into play here. IIRC, when WhatsApp launched, I was one of the early adopters. As it grew (and it became hugely popular in Brazil, where I lived) they switched to the $1/year model. Current users were auto-enrolled in a "free-for-life" plan. My friends who didn't have WhatApp would still sign up because everyone else was using it and, besides "$1/year? it's almost nothing".
There were always alternatives, just carried certain other costs. SMS was a major competitor, and as its prices have declined significantly internationally, the friction with using it would as well.
Being the first mover is not a infinitely defensible advantage. If another app comes along but doesn't carry the $1 a year fee, it wouldn't be hard to motivate people to switch.