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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#131

Post by Xenoamorphous »

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 remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can’t remember the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs Android) but it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter.

I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive).

At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded.

In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course).

I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#132

Post by johncessna »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #51
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…

By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which somehow is spun to be morally righteous.

Morally Righteous? I think it's more they don't have to so they don't. It's like the DVR days where you'd just fast forward ads. It wasn't a moral high ground, it was just easy to do and was better than the alternative.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#133

Post by stonogo »

Kwpolska wrote: post #120
timeon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, if I had to pay per message, I'd be incentivized not to send too many messages Sounds like SMS.

Except not limited to 160 characters (70 if you want Unicode) and with rich media capabilities.

So... MMS, then?

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#134

Post by xigoi »

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 don’t want to pay for YouTube because the official app, even without ads, has a much worse UX than Tubular.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#135

Post by esrauch »

mrtksn wrote: post #31
blitzar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those are tricked into it by manipulative UI or nearly impossible to cancel trials or forgotten monthly subscriptions.

How is it possible to have impossible to cancel trails? On AppStore it's in your account and takes 2 taps to cancel regardless of what the developer does. Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?

Play Store also does this now and it's a fundamentally radical departure from the era where if you give the company your card info directly theres a high chance you aren't going to be able to get out of it without paying at least some amount more than you should.

Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are physically there in person with someone to yell at and imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you what you want

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#136

Post by kalaksi »

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 don't use YT much, but if I did and paid for premium, I'd assume they'd still track me, monetize the data and utilize dark patterns and enshittified UX.

What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery.

I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#137

Post by Guest9081239812 »

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…

My site has about 30k active registered users a day. The vast majority are long term members that have been on the site for years, so they're quite dedicated to the service. Even so, only about 50 of them pay to remove advertising.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#138

Post by eddythompson80 »

toast0 wrote: post #96
throw0101c wrote: post #88

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. Depends on the price. I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier. WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired b…

> Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. (I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019) From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying. A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late…

> Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.

Huh, is that what it was... I had a Windows Phone 2012-2013 and I think I signed up for WhatsApp on it and I remember chatting with a friend on it and he was talking about the $1 per year thing and I went to check, and it said I have lifetime and I was confused how I ended up with that, but was using it so lightly that I didn't bother to look into why. I figured maybe there was a promotion the day I signed up or something.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#139

Post by tmtvl »

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…

I've got a Nebula lifetime membership and it's neat. I actually discovered channels through it (Not Just Bikes, WonderWhy, 12tone,...) which I hadn't heard of before. I also paid for YT Premium Lite in the past. The full YT Premium is too expensive for me, though.

But I feel a better example of paying for convenience is the Twitch subscriber system. They make it work in a way that others fail at by tying it in to various things like emotes and channel points and the general sense of supporting the creators. I know YT memberships exist, but I don't know how widely those are used and they just don't seem to get pushed as much.

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