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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#871

Post by frollogaston »

k_bx wrote: post #691
ale42 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one should switch, why should they switch to WhatsApp instead of something more privacy-friendly as Signal?

I'm a much heavier Signal user than WhatsApp but for broader audience it not even serious to consider. Too slow/laggish, lacks features (at some point it ate 40GB of my phone space -- with no good UI to clean it up), crashes etc. Not ready for this kind of scenario, unfortunately.

I missed 2 weeks of message notifications because Signal quietly went out of date. It had one job!

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#872

Post by mike_hearn »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #716
phyrex wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been 11 years. If they hadn't been bought they'd have found a different monetization model long ago

They kinda did. Before facebook brought them, the app cost $1/£1 per year (iirc your first year was free). Thing is back then MMS and/or texts across borders was expensive, so if you were regularly sending picture messages to people the $1/£1 sub was a no brainer. Lets wave a magic wand and presume 50% of the user base thought it was also worth $1 a year and it grew just as well as it did (It was growing very well in…

> the app cost $1/£1 per year

Not really. They claimed they'd charge this but then kept giving away free time to huge numbers of people because this wasn't an actual business model, they did it just to slow their growth down when they were running out of server capacity. It's discussed in some interview with the founder, iirc.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#873

Post by sebastiennight »

mvieira38 wrote: post #857
sebastiennight wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you block people instead of just messaging them about how you're moving to Signal, and then uninstalling WhatsApp? This approach seems unnecessarily confrontational and might end up being quite counterproductive.

Because then they have the option of readding you to group chats and sending you messages ETA: there is no way to really uninstall Whatsapp around here because so much of society runs on it, the most I can do is move all of my private existence elsewhere and hope that decreased traffic will do something

I appreciate your point of view.

Please allow me to be devil's advocate here (and FYI, this comes from someone living in a country where government officials use [official state institution]@gmail.com to ask you to send passports and other info, and tell you they'll whatsapp you your papers when they're ready).

I have not yet been in a situation where you CANNOT skip WhatsApp - since having someone be your one-time intermediary is almost always possible. Can it be an incovenience ? Yes.

How much would this inconvenience compare to what my grandfather's grandfather would consider an inconvenience? Probably not much. (You mean, I had to twiddle my thumbs for twice as many minutes!? How difficult)

So in the end, you're asking people to experience what they consider to be a major hassle (having 2 apps) just for you, when you're not willing to go through the pain of having just one app. It feels unbalanced.

So please consider that people might be complaining that you're being too much of a Don Quixote, but actually, the reason it's not working is because you're not playing the Don Quixote card hard enough

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#874

Post by int_19h »

xp84 wrote: post #82
barnabee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to know the expected ad revenue per user for makers of apps like WhatsApp, Instagram. I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.

Don’t underestimate how expensive ads are and thus how much money they can bring in. Marco Arment, the developer of Overcast podcast player, has made remarks in the past about how the ad-supported version is completely viable and may actually make him more money per user than the price of his paid option. In his case, he runs his own contextual ad system. Obviously Meta is in a completely different league in terms of…

The flip side of this is to consider why those ads are so valuable. If advertisers are consistently getting paid that much, it's because the ads are successful in extracting at least that much extra profit from the users. Which presumably comes from all the superfluous purchases they make.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#875

Post by int_19h »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #732
PenguinCoder wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which app? I paid for pro fairmail and don't have that issue with the app, currently. Which is what I'd expect.

I forgot what it was called, it was years ago. It was one of those "scan" with the camera to create PDFs of documents with some basic OCR included. The cloud feature gave you some cloud space, but OCR has to be done on the cloud (used to be locally done). Even some quasi opensource software is no better... OsmAnd (openstreetmaps for android app) had a paid "OsmAnd+" version (that i bought), and then they decided they…

To be fair, OsmAnd bears the cost of hosting those maps, and when you consider that OsmAnd+ allows you to literally download the entire globe for offline use (which translates to hundreds of gigabytes of traffic), it's clear that they need some kind of ongoing revenue stream to be sustainable. And hillshade tiles (3D terrain) are particularly large since they need to be bitmaps rather than vectors like basic maps, so making their users bear more of that cost is not unreasonable.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#876

Post by int_19h »

temporallobe wrote: post #280
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 would be fine with the consumption model as long as it’s reasonable, but I honestly believe that streaming services hate this idea because it’s not as profitable as the ad model. In fact I am becoming more and more frustrated with services that I am paying for which show me ads even for “ad-free” experiences. For example, I pay for the highest tier of ad-free Hulu and Disney+ but Hulu somehow carves out exceptions…

We've circled back to the point where pirating content one way or another is more convenient than streaming it legally.

I use StreamFab + Plex for most providers these days precisely because it offers a better experience than their own native apps. Just the other day, I tried to watch a show on Amazon only to discover that subtitles were skewed because someone messed up cutting out the ad breaks - it'd shift the subtitles by ~10s for each cut. Plex not only has the ability to adjust offsets, but it can actually analyze the audio and perform autocorrection (which works flawlessly, I must add). Of course, this also means that this show is now permanently in my video library, even if I drop my Amazon subscription. And no, I don't feel bad about that.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#877

Post by int_19h »

UnreachableCode wrote: post #111
carlosjobim wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people go absolutely mentally deranged by a simple magical incantation. The powerful incantation or spell consists of only one word: "Free". That word will make people loose their mind and their soul. It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humilia…

But Signal is free. And ad-free

Signal has its own limitations. It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't use it on tablets at all, and Android tablets are still unsupported (even as linked devices). There are other weird limits on linking, too - e.g. why can't I have a secondary phone as a linked device? Why can't I have more than 5 linked devices in total?

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#878

Post by keybored »

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…

> It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.

Can this corporate propaganda stop? Premises:

1. That we (the corporation) offer a free service is because people don’t wanna pay

2. Those freeloaders are costing us money

3. Eventually we have to introduce ads, shrugs we hate to do it but the freeloaders force our hands

Instead:

1. The strategy IS to be free to use

2. INVEST money in building the network effect

3. When a critical mass has been reached: MONETIZE

Where is the user’s preference in this? Nowhere. Why assume anything else? Why?

It is patently irrational for all parties to spend money (“pay for what you use”) on a buergoning social media platform:

- Business: why add any friction at all to a social media platform that you are supposed to grow?

- ... and why concede any talking points to the naive people who think that paid service equals no ads or monetized “attention” if you do both?

- Just monetize people instead

- User: why would anyone on God’s Green Earth pay to use a social media platform that was pay-to-use on day zero when there are no users?

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#879

Post by int_19h »

ndriscoll wrote: post #653
evrimoztamur wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not need federated messaging at the consumer app level, we need a replacement that's available at the cellular network level (just like SMS). RCS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services ) is trying to do this, but it might be too little too late.

Except RCS doesn't work on anything except phones, while XMPP works perfectly fine everywhere. IM was vastly better on computers back when you could use applications like pidgin or kopete.

The problem is mobile, and specifically the need for push notifications to have reasonable battery life. The traditional model that desktop IM clients use, where they have a permanent connection to the server, is not viable on mobile. But push notifications require you to design your protocol around them and lock you into the corresponding provider (i.e. Google or Apple, depending on the platform).

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#880

Post by anshumankmr »

mirekrusin wrote: post #557
anshumankmr wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long before they make it into a Slack/Teams competitor?

I've never seen ads in slack?

>Alongside of private messaging, people were saying they wanted to hear more about topics, teams and organizations across WhatsApp.”

That was in response to this.

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