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Comment by Danihan | Hacker News Reader

Much more than YouTube sold for, total acquisition price. Which I thought was incredible at the time (and still do, considering how difficult is has been for Google to monetize, it seems.)

I think WhatsApp was just overvalued, personally. It's excellent in many ways, but I cannot see Facebook ever making their money back on it.

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Acquiring threatening social competitors may be, in part, a cost of doing Facebook's core business. That is: Facebook bought WhatsApp not because they expected to make money off the acquisition, but because they were worried that they'd lose money from not doing so.

Today I was sitting in a hotel lounge in Dubai and a lady asked me to help send her geolocation to her friend. She asked whether she can use my Whatsapp. I said I don't have Whatsapp, but I have Messenger abd Viber. She looked at me very bewildered and asked, "You don't have Whatsapp? Why would you use Messenger?" I explained to her that in Europe we use Messenger and Viber, not Whatsapp. She thought I'm crazy. In the end I gave her hotspot and she left me to my crazy Messengering.

Dunno where in Europe you're based but WhatsApp is the defacto messaging app in Irl & UK

Same in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain. I saw an article that in the Netherlands it apparently is installed on 90% of all smartphones. As far as I know, WhatsApp is pretty much the default in the EU with the exception of Scandinavian countries. Norway, Sweden, Finland are more often to be found on Messenger.

In much of the world, WhatsApp is the preferred way of communication, instead of Facebook/FBMessenger. I use WhatsApp for very personal conversations with friends and family - breakups happen over WhatsApp, dates planned, personal news are all communicated through WhatsApp. Tapping into these kind of messages which tell FB way more than likes on pictures etc is invaluable for selling ads in my opinion. Even considering E2E encryption, I don't believe FB is not analysing this data when they have the opportunity to do so - the text analysis probably happens on device.

Nobody has found it doing that, though. It could be something that will be added in the future of course (let's hope not...), but "could be" is not really interesting for the current situation. It ain't analysing your chats at this time.

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