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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#122

Post by egypturnash »

Funes- wrote: post #102
ghusto wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands, was trying to promote Signal. I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since. There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.

You should've made sure of how Signal works with regards to chat history before you removed the app from the old phone.

"the iphone 4's antenna isn't a bad design, you're just holding it wrong" - steve jobs

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#123

Post by kovariantenkak »

illiac786 wrote: post #107

> In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp’s original philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption End-to-end encryption was added by Meta, they reused (part of) the Signal app code for this. This was a big topic for years, I am surprised by this oversight.

Fun fact: For the first few years WhatsApp didn't have any encryption whatsoever. It took public pressure for them to even add TLS.

A massive oversight on the authors part and completely missing the point of early WhatsApp as first status update application and then SMS replacement.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#125

Post by yapyap »

cameldrv wrote: post #89
filoleg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many…

I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.

Spotify I get because the Spotify free experience is HORRID.

Youtube is also moving into that direction.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#126

Post by LtWorf »

filoleg wrote: post #34
mrtksn wrote: post #8

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as conten…

I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many…

Amazon prime had a lot of customers but they started to put ads to paying customers as well.

So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#127

Post by YetAnotherNick »

ndriscoll wrote: post #90
robertlagrant wrote: post #42

> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.

How was it unsustainable? As far as I know they were simply competent. They charged $1/year, so had ~half a billion in revenue, right? They probably could've bumped that to $2-$5/year with similar uptake. And they ran it with ~500 servers and 50 employees 12 years ago, so could probably do the same with ~50 or fewer servers today.

Whatsapp revenue was $10M and the cost of revenue was $52M, with total net loss of $138M/yr just before facebook acquisition.

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#128

Post by maplant »

filoleg wrote: post #34
mrtksn wrote: post #8

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as conten…

I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many…

I pay for YT Premium and Protonmail. Very happy to do so.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#129

Post by ElijahLynn »

filoleg wrote: post #34
mrtksn wrote: post #8

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as conten…

I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many…

Paying for YT Premium is a no brainer. Especially for someone like myself with ADHD.

I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#130

Post by maplant »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #48
mrtksn wrote: post #8

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as conten…

I can say from experience and from others who have been in this position (not email, but general services); its around 1-2% of people. Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not…

Vis a vis nebula, this is definitely a product issue. Dropout.tv seems to be extremely successful and has a similar value proposition
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