[securingsincity]

$19 billion and whatsapp has 465 million users, and ICQ was purchased for $287 million had 12 million users at the time. $40 dollars per user vs $24 dollars per user.

Now if the goal were to acquire users. its far more likely that facebook would have a huge overlap in the number of users it has already and those on whatsapp. That means maybe a cost of acquisition at let's completely speculate $100 dollars per user(maybe more). It seems kind of silly. but then you think about their penetration in developing markets and network effects... I don't know I'm not zuck.

BUT on a complete tangent of my comment. I should start an Israeli chat company. they've had some big exits.

[securingsincity]

oh and the fact that whatsapp actually is very profitable

[MichaelGG]

If you can call a P/E of 800+ "very profitable"? Making $20M a year profit is no small thing at all, and I'm sure if it was bought for a billion, you'd see far less comments on the subject.

[corresation]

It makes $20 million in revenue. I've read that they're profitable, but never the number.

[ulfw]

Goes to show that only 20 Million out of 430M paid the $1/year (which has something to do with it not being charged everywhere and people having a 1 year grace period and a majority of their target market having no credit card (young audience in emerging markets)). Let's see how Zuckerberg plans to change that drastically.

[err4nt]

With advertising or selling user information? That seems to be the most likely to me given Facebook's history

[keypusher]

32 employees * 100,000 = 3.2 million Let's say a million a year for office space and another million for infrastructure and bandwidth, seems like they were fairly profitable for what they had. No idea how Facebook plans to recoup $20 billion though.

[ulfw]

Not with charging $1 a pop, that's for sure.

[klochner]

not very profitable compared to the acquisition price.

[josu]

20 million in revenue last year is very profitable? Twitter makes that in a day.

[MichaelGG]

Twitter generates about $2M in revenue a day. And they make nothing since they're not profitable. So compared to Twitter, WhatsApp is undefined profitable.

[colinbartlett]

Are you sure there is such a big overlap between WhatsApp users and Facebook users?

The US is Facebook's biggest market but I would bet the US is no where near the top of WhatsApp's market list.