Re:WhatsApp Introduces Ads in Its App
by mschuster91 on Monday June 16, 2025 @10:22AM
(#44289796)
Pre acquisition Whatsapp had 450M users. Even accounting for half the revenue of 1$ going away for payment fees (30%) and taxes (20%), that would still have been a nice cushy 200 million $ a year in almost pure profit - WA had 55 (!) employees at acquisition and 550 servers [1].
That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.
The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].
Re:WhatsApp Introduces Ads in Its App
by paxys on Monday June 16, 2025 @10:35AM
(#44289962)
That fee wasn't really enforced. I was in India at the time and no one paid because no one had credit cards tied to their account. Everyone still used WhatsApp just fine.
That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.
The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].
[1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843