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Comment by dlojudice | Hacker News Reader

Is monetizing through ads the only way to go? Is FB org trapped on its modus operandis (innovator's dilemma)?

What about payments (charging a small fee for transactions) on their platform? The number of people already making business transactions on WhatsApp platform is huge, specially in Brazil [1]. A big bank in Brazil has already tried to grab this market by creating a keyboard with wire transfer integration [2].

This model is very similar to what WeChat has done in China.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatsapp-is-the-main-digital-c... [2] https://medium.com/@leandroscosta/bank-ita%C3%BA-launch-a-ke...

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IIRC Facebook has been pushing WhatsApp to add adds for a while, their pseudo independence prevented it but ... yeah I think Facebook's "slap ads on it" or "sell our customers" system is their one trick.

Square, a company with many years headstart, trades at a high multiple, and has many more integration points into commerce than WhatsApp does currently, trades at a market cap of $27 billion.

Given that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, trying a low probability strategy of trying to compete for market share where the best case scenario is $27 billion in value seems foolish.

Square and Whatsapp are basically not comparable business entities.

If WhatsApp decided to move to payments, it is the closest analog.

No, square is fundamentally geared towards long-tail consumer retail, not peer-to-peer payments, and it's very credit card oriented. They still would not even be comparable.

What is the Cash app then?

An okay alternative to Venmo.

The UI is definitely worse (IMO) and they've done a piss poor job at tying users to identities more than using phone numbers. Nobody I know uses Cash App except in exceptional cases. I have to double and triple check usernames to make sure I'm not sending money to the wrong person.

The Cash app is a pretty small percentage of Square's revenue. Square isn't much more than a credit card processor for small businesses IMO.

Wouldn’t the closest analog be WeChat? Square isn’t a messaging platform.

I was referencing the guy above who suggested WhatsApp become a commerce platform, and why that is hard.

WeChat definitely does many of those things, but that’s far from it’s only monetization Model

Let whatsapp just add payment and take a 1% fee, it's really not that hard.

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