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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#201

Post by noosphr »

yibg wrote: post #170
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Similar situation as flights. People complain about lack of space, misc fees etc. But when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight. I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free altern…

People pick the cheapest flights because price is a simple number they can understand.

How to you qualify the comfort of a seat with 20cm of legroom vs 30cm? Until we have a quality metric for flights that's also a single number we can't.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#202

Post by makeitdouble »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #131
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…

> people would never pay for software.

I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions.

We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#203

Post by philipwhiuk »

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.

How does it handle phone theft?

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#204

Post by nytesky »

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…

YT Premium is pretty expensive. I think it costs as much for one user for a multi-device plan on Netflix?

They don’t create nor curate much content.

I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#205

Post by neves »

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…

Time to make it a public app and remove it from the private sector.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#207

Post by nytesky »

scrivanodev wrote: post #163
nkrisc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I only use it because it is free. If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it , and my life would be same as it is now. There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.

What would you replace YouTube with? To my its educational value is unmatched. I owe so much of my learning to it.

Can you elaborate on your learning journey? How did you separate out the worthless content from quality education programs? Very few Unis post lectures anymore, so it’s all hit or miss for me.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#208

Post by Aerbil313 »

Today is the day the notion of the 'internet is free, good and a convenience' is over for the global public. WhatsApp was the first ever primary convenience brought by the advent of the internet - it fulfilled a legitimate need all over the world by providing essentially free, limitless, boundless communication if you had few megabytes of internet in your mobile quota. It is to this day the #1 most used app for a good percentage of the population, only surpassed by social media. (Mostly because of the immortal network effects lingering from a decade ago.)

I was honestly expecting it, after recently seeing on a friend's phone that it already essentially turned to social media on Android. They can't yet push it on the higher income iPhone users (lest they switch to other messenger apps), but change is coming rather inevitably since it's nothing but untapped advertising dollars potential in the eyes of the behemoth that is Meta.

I don't think there's a sustainable solution here except to self-host a Matrix server for family and friends if you have the time, money and technical expertise.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#209

Post by Krasnol »

gruez wrote: post #165
blitzar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king. Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.

Signal also claims the same: > We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either. Should we be suspicious of Signal as well?

Sure you should be suspicious. You should always be suspicious. Especially if it's free. And you can do something to calm your suspicions. Like checking out Signlas Open Source code.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#210

Post by acheron »

kalaksi wrote: post #136
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 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…

Exactly. The earlier post is overlooking the insanity of giving Google money, and acting as if they wouldn’t just track you harder now that you have to be logged in with an account connected to your real identity and a credit card. I wouldn’t pay for YouTube for the same reason I wouldn’t pay for Gmail. But I’m happy to pay for another email provider.
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