[downandout]

You do if you’ve been acquired for $19 billion. The founders couldn’t have been naive enough to think that Facebook and its shareholders didn’t have a need to monetize such an enormous investment. Facebook is not a charity, it’s a business.

[DSingularity]

Facebook monetizes Whatsapp by limiting its growth. You can easily think of all the “social” functionality Whatsapp could have added in competition with FB and Messenger.

[kerng]

Facebook paid 19 billion to buy up competition, as WhatsApp was a threat to the Facebook ecosystem.

[unlimit]

That is what I am seeing now here in India, folks in my circle barely post anything to facebook now, all pictures, status messages are on WhatsApp now.

[BurningFrog]

If FB pays $19B for every messenger competitor that gets traction, that's a huge incentive to make more of them.

[ksaxena]

There are network effects at play; so once a messenger has locked-in most users, it's extremely hard for newcomers to gain sustainable traction.

[bryanrasmussen]

yeah but now you have to compete with WhatsApp to get that traction, so maybe a hard slog.

[sjclemmy]

And if FB shut down WhatsApp, users will be looking to go elsewhere, and probably not FB Messenger.