Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#381

Post by krageon » Fri, Aug 03, 2018, 12:45 PM UTC

chosenbreed wrote: post #350

thirdsun wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to know WhatsApp's user base to understand this. Here in germany it's the de-facto standard communication platform. Everyone and their mother uses WhatsApp - and I mean that literally: Lots of old, non-tech-savvy folks use the service - the kind that even see creating an account as a barrier big enough to not use the service. I still think using the phone number as account was a genius move that enabled wide…

Okay. But not so long ago people had to pay for WhatsApp, no? Has the user base grown tremendously since it became free (i.e. because it became free)? One of the points made earlier is that before being bought by Facebook WhatsApp was a profitable operation. If that was the case then there is clearly an argument for having a relatively low cost subscription based offering...

It didn't "become" free. It has always been free for some significant fraction of the userbase. As was mentioned repeatedly all over the comments here, many people have never seen the payment screen at all.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#382

Post by jf- » Fri, Aug 03, 2018, 1:42 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #379

jf- wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the parent’s point was that running a business that is self-sustaining is actually a difficult endeavour, and doing what looks like ‘squeezing customers’ from the outside is actually what the business needs to do to survive. I think this is a reasonable point, considering that no matter what price point many services are offered at, customers will still complain that it’s too high. Leading me to my question…

The person you are responding to is talking about the bigger picture, whereas you are focusing on a local detail. While you make a really good point if you consider that you honestly thought you were talking about the same thing, instead you were not. Now it looks like you've subtly moved the goalposts, so that the person you are responding to has an argument that sounds ridiculous. Even though you've not responded t…

Really? Is there a way of equating people with MBAs to conquering invaders that doesn’t sound ridiculous?

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#383

Post by swaggyBoatswain » Fri, Aug 03, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

Smirnoff wrote: post #115

russellbeattie wrote: post #78

Whatsapp 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…

Being an MBA doesn't change whether or not you can sell something though. Anyone can equally be good at selling things, its more of a personality type if anything

I don't see the purpose of MBAs unless you are doing high level management at a mid-large company, and you are supplementing it with other (core) skills such as software development. The other reason you would take an MBA is if you want an equivalent knowledge set of a bachelors business degree without having formal training.

I think the MBA hate is warranted to some degree, because you see far too many people taking an MBA as a "backup" option. I've dealt with way too many people with MBA degrees that have no idea what they are talking about.

I'm a strong believer that business skills need to be won by hard-earned experience.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#384

Post by rhizome » Fri, Aug 03, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

xkjkls wrote: post #227

rhizome wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots? Woudn't it fundamentally be a DLC strategy?

I’m talking a social media platform. Video games are fundamentally different because the goal is to get a small number of highly engaged users. Social media drives value from having huge networks of large numbers of people. There are people who spend 10 hours a day playing Fortnite, and are perfectly willing to spend gobs of money to make that experience better. There aren’t the same sort of “whales” in social media.

Is it too abstract to suggest that it's merely one business model incorporating proven features of another business model?

Video games are not fundamentally different here, I think you might be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. People who use a thing paying money for more features of that thing.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#385

Post by reitanqild » Fri, Aug 03, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

axaxs wrote: post #282

reitanqild wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption While Telegram annoy me more and more by some of their crypto moves this just isn't true and we should stop spreading this lie. Please help me stop this idea that only E2E is crypto. For examples of not encrypted data, look at telnet and plain http, they are unencrypted protocols and anyone can read the content as it passes over their network.

sorry, i didn't understand your point. Which part are you saying isn't true? If it's about 'encrypted' vs 'e2e encrypted' I apologize as I was vague, but did preface it with the fact only e2e would be considered.

> I compared them all at one time. Encrypted by default was a must, the rest were excluded.

> ...

> Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption

Here's what I see.

Encrypted by default seems to be what you wrote, not e2e.

There's enough problems with Telegram that we don't need to lie to create new ones ;-)

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#386

Post by aylmao » Fri, Aug 03, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

EduardoBautista wrote: post #72

aylmao wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cruel because WhatsApp is already there and people rely on it. Also worth noting, second point applies to Facebook but WhatsApp is encrypted.

WhatsApp was encrypted before the acquisition. And I am 100% confident that is why they want to find a way to monetize it directly. Not having access to data is not something they are used to. You don't see them telling the FB Messenger team: "Hey, you need to make money."

> WhatsApp was encrypted before the acquisition.

WhatsApp was acquired February 2014 and end-to-end encrypted April 2016.

> And I am 100% confident that is why they want to find a way to monetize it directly. Not having access to data is not something they are used to.

I agree.

> You don't see them telling the FB Messenger team: "Hey, you need to make money."

I mean, I'm sure they have. Messenger has ads.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#387

Post by zeusk » Fri, Aug 03, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

lordgrenville wrote: post #335

ng12 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but who do you think is pushing the company to bow to the shareholder pressure?

A company has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, who bought the stock on the assumption that the company will be run in their best interests. If they do't do that they are open to shareholder lawsuits. (This is the way that activist investors often work.)

Activist investors fight for power in board rooms, not in court rooms.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#388

Post by Albert500 » Sat, Aug 04, 2018, 3:26 AM UTC

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Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#389

Post by storgendibal » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:10 AM UTC

secfirstmd wrote: post #241

storgendibal wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer with an MBA here. My two cents: Back when I was writing code, my worldview was that if engineers ran every company, then the world would simply be a better, more rational place. Because engineering is hard and everything else is easy/squishy/learnable. During my b-school classes, it dawned on me that things are much more complicated than I had thought. Marketing and sales are very hard, very quantitative, an…

Personally I just wish less of our world class minds were working at huge, de facto advertising companies thinking about how to monetise/track the flow of information, sneak an microsecond advantage on the stock market etc and more were solving more important stuff like climate change, disease and democracy/human rights being under retreat. Lets be honest here, Whatsapp gathered hundreds of millions of users with a t…

I don't disagree. I think a lot of the debate on this thread comes down to free market economics and whether you believe it leads to a global maxima or not.

I think that starts to approach a religious belief, so I don't think I want to get into that debate, but I have yet to see a system that works better than the free-market (plus a reasonable safety net )

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#390

Post by sreyaNotfilc » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

zilian wrote: post #76

sreyaNotfilc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering if this pressure was in response to the 20% decline on FB stocks. Its as if the shareholders looked at their portfolio in search of companies acquired that could fill that void.

Why does a 20% decline in one day of trading matter after such a bull run-up since IPO ? Its just a tiny warning.

Maybe its my warped understanding of how multi-billion dollar boardrooms are ran.

To me, its not necessarily how well are our projects doing. Its more, squeeze out the most we can get from every asset and then squeeze for more.

I understand that Facebook will run just fine with or without the 20%, but I can imagine hearing this news and then looking around the room to find what acquisitions haven't performed well. Almost like a "What have you done for me lately?" vibe. Yes, its a bit warped to think that way (but fun too).