Re:WhatsApp Introduces Ads in Its App
by RestlessMind on Monday June 16, 2025 @07:45PM
(#44294371)
Correct. I used Android phones back then and so did all my family members and most of my friends. No one I knew paid a dime for Whatsapp.
I remember that the grace period was extended one or two times when it was time to pay, and then Facebook bought it.
Re:WhatsApp Introduces Ads in Its App
by prmoustache on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @03:19AM
(#44296494)
I remember people being angered and threatening to leave if they had to pay that 1$/€ fee per year. And now here we are with ads.
The average person would rather view 100 adverts than pay 1 cent to get rid of them. We see it time and again.
The average company would rather charge that 1 cent and still show adverts. We see that time and again.
Do we see that? What I see again and again is companies pretending to make that offer and then adding ads anyway. You can only fool people so often.
They only had 55 employees when facebook bought them. I suspect their infrastructure costs were much less than you've suggested too. There's a reason whatsapp only supported one device: they didn't store messages after they were delivered.
There's no way they actually earned $500M/year. Even if Whatsapp had 100 employees making $200k/year on average, that's $20M on salaries. Add an another very generous $80M on infra/admin etc costs and they'd have been making $400M profit. With that much profit achieved within such a short period, in the QE funny money era they could have IPO'd at $50-100 billion easily.