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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#91

Post by roryirvine »

doix wrote: post #26
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 WhatsApp costing money, 1$ per year or per lifetime or something. I paid for it, I think it was a WinRar situation though, where deleting and reinstalling the app gave it to you for free or something. I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.

Other way round. Facebook bought them in 2014, and they dropped the fee in early 2016.

The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying.

But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#92

Post by jahnu »

andrepd wrote: post #78
jahnu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal have a few things that make it a hard sell. It's really hard to clean up media. You have to go into every single chat and from there go about deleting stuff. At least they finally added a "select all" option in there recently. So the size of it just grows and grows and grows until it's using all the space on your phone. Not a good fit for non-technical types. Secondly, no web view. There is the desktop app yes…

It's very frustrating, I admit. Backups and archival are indeed a pet peeve of mine, as are the frequent redesigns (but that's just a "feature" virtually every single god-damn modern app). What is the alternative though? A private chat app, mobile + desktop, syncing, with enough ease of setup and use for normies to adopt? I don't see it.

I suppose the true alternative would be a standard open protocol that enables this cross platform.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#93

Post by filoleg »

throw0101c wrote: post #88
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 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…

Not to dismiss your point about pricing numbers (as it is valid and makes sense to me), but I don’t think iCloud comparison is that applicable to my argument, given there is no option to pay for larger iCloud storage with ad exposure.

What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#94

Post by detaro »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #84
detaro wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if the number was for Facebook specifically or all Meta apps, but they did quote a number of around $70 revenue per year per US user a while ago. (with (much) lower numbers in other parts of the world)

These numbers are actually kinda interesting, in that they're based on user location, not advertiser. So basically all global companies target the US first because it's a big market with consistent regulations and mostly one language (compare to the EU where you'd need English/German/French/Spanish/Polish and still would miss a lot). So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many peo…

> So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users.

But the capital inflow is also because there is a lot of consumer spending in the US to convert.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#95

Post by carlosjobim »

paxys wrote: post #66
Workaccount2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a chance.

Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it.

YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos.

Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#96

Post by toast0 »

throw0101c wrote: post #88
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 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 December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.

B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get the reminders that the account was going to expire, and then on the day of, it would silently extend the account and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd pay next time.

Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a US country for a large number of people, b) there are countries with significant number of people living on a dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger.

I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming payments are even over the year (probably not a good assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple years though), or less than 10%.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#97

Post by BiggerChungus »

robertlagrant wrote: post #42

> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.

Respectfully, clearly you aren't familiar with Jan and Brian's history of public statements.

Even for years after they were acquired by Meta, Jan refused to allow advertising and kept pushing the $1 dollar per user subscription fee. Sheryl nixed it b/c it was "not scalable."

VC's may have the mindset that the founders will eventually acquiesce to ads, but also they didn't really care b/c all they wanted was an exit, which they got.

The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#98

Post by robertlagrant »

ndriscoll wrote: post #90
robertlagrant wrote: post #42

> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.

How was it unsustainable? As far as I know they were simply competent. They charged $1/year, so had ~half a billion in revenue, right? They probably could've bumped that to $2-$5/year with similar uptake. And they ran it with ~500 servers and 50 employees 12 years ago, so could probably do the same with ~50 or fewer servers today.

They're doing a lot more now, though. Voice notes; multi-way video and audio calls; e2ee. And they barely even charged $1/year. I never paid for it.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#99

Post by robertlagrant »

BiggerChungus wrote: post #97
robertlagrant wrote: post #42

> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.

Respectfully, clearly you aren't familiar with Jan and Brian's history of public statements. Even for years after they were acquired by Meta, Jan refused to allow advertising and kept pushing the $1 dollar per user subscription fee. Sheryl nixed it b/c it was "not scalable." VC's may have the mindset that the founders will eventually acquiesce to ads, but also they didn't really care b/c all they wanted was an exit,…

> The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day.

Fair enough, but the founders don't necessarily make these decisions. I wasn't particularly referring to them. If they got VC money (I don't know if they did or not) then the VCs must've had something in mind to get a decent return on their risk.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#100

Post by ghusto »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #17
leokennis wrote: post #7

At least in The Netherlands, WhatsApp could show a 60 second unskippable modal ad video on every launch, and still get away with it due to network effects. If you’re not on WhatsApp, no updates or news from your kids school, your sports team, your family, your car dealership etc. for you.

Signal seems to be booming right now in the Netherlands. I've been using it for years and never managed to grow my contact list beyond single digits, being a few friends in tech and a few who were very privacy conscious. All of those people were also available on WhatsApp and we'd often forget and message one another there. But since January the trust in Meta has not only plummeted but it's become a mainstream enough…

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.

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