Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

881–890 of 1001 posts

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#881

Post by xp84 »

Marsymars wrote: post #305
xp84 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost. The ad-free one doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU. There’s a pretty reasonable argument to be made that social media services with ne…

> doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU

I'll state up front that I'm not much of a socialist, so I realize opinions will vary, but it seems crazy to regulate something so frivolous as a social media site to the point of setting its prices. If people don't like Facebook, their ads, or their pricing, simply not using it is not a life-crippling suggestion the way "don't use the Internet" is.

So I'd support you on regulating broadband ISPs waaaaay before setting the prices X or FB can charge for meme-related services.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#882

Post by redeeman »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #266
als0 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in Europe it’s the opposite.

You can still survive without Facebook-crap perfectly. On the other hand it's hard to survive without either an Android or iPhone device.

its pretty easy to "survive". Why do you make it seem like life and death??

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#883

Post by dataexporter »

mvieira38 wrote: post #794
yakkomajuri wrote: post #769

I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp. I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and…

Last night I just removed myself from every friend groupchat and blocked everyone there, while leaving a status message about how they can reach me on Signal or call me. If they are actually your friends they'll come around, and families survived before Whatsapp existed. I'm also brazilian, I just won't stand with people dismissing what matters to me as if I'm a nutjob for not using their fascist app

I admire the conviction, but I think you're underestimating the social inertia that platforms like WhatsApp benefit from.

The unfortunate reality is that most people won’t follow you. Not because they don’t respect you or your concerns, but because the cost—in effort, friction, or just breaking habitual patterns—is too high. Social coordination is fragile, and it leans heavily on lowest-common-denominator tools. WhatsApp has become that denominator.

What’s likely to happen is this: group chats will move on without you. Events will get planned. Conversations will unfold. People aren’t going to message you separately to accommodate your principled stand—not out of malice, but out of convenience and momentum. You’ll be increasingly left out, not because anyone wants to isolate you, but because ecosystems don't fracture easily.

After a few months of being disconnected and missing out, there’s a strong chance you’ll reinstall WhatsApp—not because you’ve changed your mind, but because opting out of a near-universal platform means opting out of modern social participation.

This isn’t a defeat of principle—it’s a reflection of how network effects work. The only way to realistically challenge something like WhatsApp is if a critical mass moves at once. Individual protest, while noble, often just leads to isolation unless it becomes collective action.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#884

Post by overfeed »

high_na_euv wrote: post #648
overfeed wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value. WhatsApp had payments (or a pilot) pre-acquisiton. At $1/year, it was an amazing value proposition even for those earning $1/day. IIRC, this was when WhatsApp had 3-500M users globally. Interestingly, they allowed people to pay the sub…

1 day salary for chat app? Are you nuts?

Did you know people below the poverty line would by $20 S40 feature phones just to be able to run WhatsApp? The other 2G phones cost less than half that amount, but you had to pay $0.1-$0.2 per SMS sent, in that light, spending $1 per year for WhatsApp's unlimited messages on a PAYG data package was a steal.

So no, I am not nuts, you just didn't think through the value proposition.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#885

Post by torben-friis »

purerandomness wrote: post #678
torben-friis wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully it’s not intrusive - you can pretty much ignore the bottom menu and have adfree chat, I’ve been doing it for years. The moment they start placing calls to action and distraction in that view is the moment people will move - telegram is a drop in replacement with more features, I won’t argue it’s the ideal choice but at least it keeps meta on their toes as a potential competitor.

Telegram introduced ads in 2021.

I know. My point is that they act as a bottom for how much WhatsApp can be enshittified. Once they go below there’s not a lot of friction against switching.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#886

Post by tcfhgj »

ivell wrote: post #551
tcfhgj wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not interested in paying Google for anything. It's a company too big and powerful through immoral business (ads) I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.

I can understand weapons industry or alcohol industry as being immoral. However I do not understand how ads are immoral. It is annoying for some, while for some it is informative. Businesses inform the public about their services through ads. Or do you mean how Google implemented its ads?

Commercial unrequested ads in general, they are designed to manipulate you to make you buy products you wouldn't have bought otherwise.

Additionally, a related negative side effect is consumerism.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#888

Post by muppetman »

sebastiennight wrote: post #859
muppetman wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for YT Premium. Not because I care for stupid videos, but because you get YT Music for free with it... Spotify is the hottest of garbage in my opinion, constantly trying to push podcasts at me. Why more people don't cancel Spotify and just pay for YT Premium - you get ad-free videos and all the music of Spotify. Plus with YT Music you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got t…

> you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got that isn't on Spotify you can have anywhere you're logged into your YT Music account. FYI you can also do this with Spotify[0]. [Ø]: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/

I don't think that's the same, is it? That's just Spotify letting you play files on your local device. With YT Music you upload them from one device to the YT Music cloud, and then any device can access them/stream from the YT Cloud. You can't upload your music to Spotify, only use it to access media that's stored locally on your device.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#889

Post by Marsymars »

xp84 wrote: post #881
Marsymars wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost. The ad-free one doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU. There’s a pretty reasonable argument to be made that social media services with ne…

> doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU I'll state up front that I'm not much of a socialist, so I realize opinions will vary, but it seems crazy to regulate something so frivolous as a social media site to the point of setting its prices. If people don't like Facebook, their ads, or their pricing, simply not using it is not a life-crippling suggestion the way "don't use the Internet" is. So I'd suppor…

I'm not much of a socialist either, and I wish that social media was frivolous enough that I didn't see their regulation as a reasonable proposition.

The problem isn't access to memes, it's that for various categories of services/interactions, Meta (and presumably WeChat and/or others in other locales) properties effectively are the internet. I've seen all of the following use social media services as their sole method of communication or online presence: amateur sports teams/leagues, gyms, local governments, government agencies, parent/school groups, local service providers (barbers, farmers' markets, restaurants, etc.), online classifieds, community food boxes.

The fact that Meta has intermingled its meme factory with its hosting of the informational/communication platforms for a wide array of local groups/organizations/businesses is something they chose to do, and I'm not willing to accept the excuse of "we make a lot of money from our ad-serving brainrot algorithms so we couldn't possibly charge less than that amount of money for access to the non-algorithmic features on which we've gotten people hooked."

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#890

Post by sebastiennight »

muppetman wrote: post #888
sebastiennight wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got that isn't on Spotify you can have anywhere you're logged into your YT Music account. FYI you can also do this with Spotify[0]. [Ø]: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/

I don't think that's the same, is it? That's just Spotify letting you play files on your local device. With YT Music you upload them from one device to the YT Music cloud, and then any device can access them/stream from the YT Cloud. You can't upload your music to Spotify, only use it to access media that's stored locally on your device.

Last time I tried, I was able to load the local file on desktop, and then sync that playlist on mobile (to listen to the "desktop song" on mobile even when offline). So I'd argue it provided similar functionality.
Post reply on HN