111–120 of 831 posts
$16B for something I've never even heard of. I feel like I'm living under a pile of rocks.
Don't feel bad; no one really uses them in the US (except us foreigners to communicate with friends and family abroad). They are the de-facto messaging service in the rest of the world (except for China).
So why do people use WhatsApp instead of Facebook for messaging?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or facebook is trying to trivialize and destroy the startup market.
the startup market of other messenger apps? The ones that are around are already big and profitable (KakaoTalk, LINE etc).
This creates a very unhealthy attitude around tech startups that will have a cascading effect on the entire industry. It's like a hegemonic military policy. The strategy doesn't matter, as long as you have a big stick.
Such a waste. Most Whatsapp users already use Facebook in parallel. Facebook will never see a ROI on this acquisition. Not even close.
I'm convinced that Facebook is just investing in the market for ridiculously high purchases, artificially inflating the market.
400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…
I don't think they're buying it per current user. It's either about paying for future users (granted, triple the user base and it's still a lot) or a game of defense against a potential competitor. They bought the photo company at what seemed an outrageous amount in part to co-opt a competitor. In the end it was profitable. They alter their feed to look more Twitter-like, encouraging people to avoid the competitor. I…
Are you talking about Instagram? Unless I've been living under a rock I haven't heard or read anything that says they're profitable.
16B? That's a B, people. While there are a lot of whatsapp users (and people have to pay to use it), wow, that's still a lot of money! How can they justify revenue that way? How can any company ever consider such acquisition? I don't even think Google can even make 16B like this. See this discussion: http://www.quora.com/WhatsApp-Messenger/How-much-revenue-is-... $20M net revenue, at most, right? With future expansio…