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Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

wsj.com

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

#301

Post by smoovb »

noncoml wrote: post #15

Almost everybody I know has at least 2 messaging apps installed on their phone. What's to stop people start migrating to Signal/Telegram/Viber/Keybase/etc.. once WhatsApp starts displaying ads?

I have 12. No real switching cost.

Telegram - Thought Leaders + productivity Slack - Biz stuff Line - Thai ppl WeChat - Chinese ppl Hangouts - school + free calls Viber - Old way to call WhatsApp - Late adopters Messeger - Sheeple Signal - Privacy people Keybase - Experimental iMessage - Grandmas and Moms Skype - backup plan Kin - Umm

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

#303

Post by ramsr »

lx3459683 wrote: post #273
Synroc wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious in your path. What made you decide to get an MBA being an engineer, and what are you doing now with that degree?

It's the path people take when they're not very good at engineering but want the medium bucks.

Sweeping generalization.

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

#304

Post by ratacat »

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…

Here's my favorite group of smart people working on solving climate change.

Http://regen.network

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

#305

Post by lx3459683 »

ramsr wrote: post #303
lx3459683 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the path people take when they're not very good at engineering but want the medium bucks.

Sweeping generalization.

Our ability to generalize is one of the key traits that makes us the dominant species on this planet. Describing that particular commenter's path is not nearly as informationally useful as describing the most common path.

MBA is the business equivalent of " Specialist Certification" in engineering. It's for the second-rate.

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

#307

Post by smoovb »

thanatropism wrote: post #27
wilsonchaney wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effect. My anecdote - out of, say, 50 people I know, two have Telegram. The rest use a combination of iMessage, Facebook messenger, and WhatsApp. 22yo male.

Telegram here has the reputation of a chat app you might use to hide naughty online liaisons from your wife. Like something indexed to an alternative identity. (So: like what the internet used to be like in olden times. But still.)

Telegram is a hands-down better experience than whats app.

I think it’s the first one to give the ability to edit messages after you sent them.

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

#308

Post by dalbasal »

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,…

>>It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service.

This isn't that much of a factor. FB paid $19bn for Whatsapp. A small profit on a $100m or $500m revenue base is never going to justify even a fraction of that acqisition price.

FB sort of set this standard themselves. They didn't pay attention to revenue early, as the movie said: A million dollars isn't cool. A billion users is cool. At IPO-time, those billion users still didn't ad up to revenue. This is much later than google, who had a mature business model much earlier.

Then, FB actually did find a formula to turn their 2 bn free users into a revneue stream. They proved it can be done.

Putting on the ruthless analyst hat... There are two reasons for the whatsapp bidding war: (1) keep it from the competition (2) potentially turn 2bn users into >$2bn revenue. FB already achieved no. 1. The ruthless business thing to do would be to force whatsapp to bet the house on achieving no. 2.

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

#309

Post by ramsr »

dep_b wrote: post #151

I don't remember any new feature I liked since Facebook took over. Perhaps some stuff in the group chats that I liked but that's it. So if there's some kind of momentum for another messaging app I'll jump ship early.

In India, they recently launched payments within Whatsapp which is a major breakthrough IMO.

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

#310

Post by Broken_Hippo »

mrweasel wrote: post #297
anuragbiyani wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are completely mistaken if you think adding a subscription-only would not reduce usage of WhatsApp by 10x at least. I am an Indian (WhatsApp's biggest market by far), and know for a fact that hardly 1% of people using it right now in India would be able/willing to set up a payment system AND willing to pay $1 for it (which is not as inexpensive as you think) when there are so many free alternatives. And then it i…

If you can't charge people even $1 for your product, then I would argue that you might as well close up now. As others pointed out, ads won't work either, because if you can't afford to pay $1 for WhatsApp, then I'm not going to be able to profit from showing you ads. Ads aren't magical things you can slap on a product to make it profitable. For ads to work you need an audience that technically could pay for you prod…

"if you can't charge people even $1 for your product...."

Only folks aren't always just paying $1. He's describing folks needing to set up a freaking payment system for a small amount of money - and that some folks aren't going to be able to do that and others aren't going to be willing. That's even before you get into the actual payment of $1. And this is before even considering there are other free apps that will work. There is a limit to the inconvenience folks will go through for your product if there are simpler alternatives, and being blind to this sort of thing could kill your company.

It also doesn't mean that folks cannot profit from ads. It isn't like all ads require you to pay through the internet - On my phone, I've gotten ads from a local coffee shop chain. I liken this sort of ad a cable tv ad. It might not get folks clicking on a website, but it might get folks in your store.

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