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Okay, first off: This is great. The most popular messaging app finally gets the security it needed. And we've just rolled out E2E to 1b 'monthly active users'. However, I have always wondered one thing about WhatsApp: How does it generate any kind of meaningful revenue?
Apparently they've ditched the old $1 subscription model [0], and even that was so loosely enforced that I have never paid a single cent for WhatsApp in my life--and never will (got it while it was free on the iOS App Store and now have a 'Lifetime' subscription, if they don't change those at some point).
And even back then, maybe half of their 900m monthly active users [1] were iOS users who paid only once, and the rest may have dodged the fee in various ways. I have a really hard time believing the revenues so gained could ever actually cover the cost of R&D (especially for so many platforms) and infrastructure (which should be huge, given the amount of data they shift). Now they say they want customers to use WhatsApp as a platform, the way Facebook Messenger is doing it, but I'm not seeing any of those features implemented anywhere.
I always assumed there was some heavy data analysis going on behind the scenes--which would have been fair, I guess, since we're neither being shown ads nor really paying. Facebook's involvement added to that conviction. Now that they're encrypting everything (which, again, is wonderful), they can't analyze what is really, really interesting data anymore (keywords, etc.). And it's not like there was a public outcry for them to take this step--I would guess that not many end users actually appreciate the importance of E2E encryption. So the question remains: How are they making money? You still have metadata (I presume), but then again, how do they use this data to make money if they can't always match it to a Facebook profile (where they can show you ads), and also, does this data really provide such a big improvement over all the data collected by Facebook and Facebook messenger? It just seems strange to me that WhatsApp apparently does not want to make any money. Does anyone have any insight on this? What am I missing? [0]: http://www.cnet.com/news/whatsapp-kills-1-subscription-fee/
[1]: http://qz.com/495419/whatsapp-has-900-million-monthly-active... |
FB shelled out $15B for Whatsapp, and clearly the contents of these messages was a major factor in that valuation, especially once the subscription fee was phased out.
Now they're voluntarily encrypting. The only explanation I can come up with is that they are realizing that they will not be able to keep the contents of these messages for themselves in the face of motivated nation-state actors, and so they're killing that golden goose rather than share it. This seems pretty extreme and makes me wonder what is really going on behind the scenes.
My assumption is that there is a contingency to monetize metadata (something I'm not seeing discussed here too much) but I can't help but wonder if FB is now looking at the $15B as a huge overpayment.