WhatsApp Will Start Showing Ads | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp Will Start Showing Ads

entrepreneur.com

76 pointsnixass33 comments

Comments from an HN user with username brianacton, from 2 years ago -

"I remember this pretty clearly. I always liked the $0.99 per year model because it was pure and simple. However, it was a three way decision with Mark for it, Jan somewhat on the fence, and me against. The primary argument being that payment was artificially hindering growth. Frankly, our growth was just fine at the time. History tells us how the decision landed."

This may or may not be the actual Brian Acton (founder of whatsapp)

Let’s not forget that WhatsApp was an app that was profitable without ever showing ads or destroying its users’ privacy before being bought by Facebook.

They built up a massive user base while still charging several dollars for their app.

They charged only 1 US Dollar, after the first year. That was removed after the Facebook acquisition. https://www.cnet.com/news/whatsapp-kills-1-subscription-fee/

And this was never really enforced. I don't know anyone who paid for it.

I remember when I paid the $0.99 after the first year a friend told me "if you uninstall the app and reinstall it, you get another year for free".

My father was one of its earliest adopters, even before I was. He paid for it. I joined maybe sometime in 2012 or 2013. WhatsApp kept renewing my subscription for free. Also, fun fact, my first version of WhatsApp was on a Nokia phone... With the Symbian OS.

We have really come a long way since then.

Any source on them being profitable vs having revenue? IIRC they were very inconsistent in charging users, depending on the country, platform, time you signed up, etc.

They had roughly 6 employees and 20 beefy servers when they sold to Facebook. They were solidly profitable. Sort of wish they went the Craigslist route rather than taking Facebook billions.

I’m seeing 55 employees when I google

This is very wrong. I worked as an intern at WhatsApp in 2013 and they had over 30 employees, a lot were actually customer support. And “customer support” doesn’t do it justice. Every feature shipped was translated across 30 languages and CS was made up of people who could do a lot of the translation in house as well as provide actual support. I was an engineer on the website that dealt with all the support articles and translation, but the platform teams were all two engineers per platform, and then the backend engineers who worked magic with erlang.

So, no source and you’re just guessing, based on no actual data?

"[The messages] will not be advertisements for commercial purposes, but rather for services, always linked to the community or the app."

Yeah, the title is misleading

Needs a dang intervention ideally.

The title isn't misleading at all. The title is exactly what the article says.

This article is translated from Spanish using some kind of AI (see disclaimer at the top of the article). Because of this it's not clear what this article is actually talking about, ads or a new type of notification.

Indeed, it's vague and confusing, it sounds a lot like corporate speak for ads. "Valuable messages from our partners" sort of thing.

From the first few paragraphs it seems like they are describing some sort of toast notification for when they have some sort of announcement to make, but that wording could very well be a euphemism for targeted ads.

This is the spanish wording from the original article

>Como tal, no serán anuncios publicitarios con fines comerciales, sino más bien de servicios, siempre ligado a la comunidad o a la app

Which has the same meaning as the english translation in the article.

As such, they will not be advertisements for commercial purposes, but rather for services, always linked to the community or the app.

avisos y anuncios can also mean notices and announcements. I don’t know why AI went the Ads route.

Wish they stayed with 1 dollar a year funding model. I would pay 5 dollars a month for a family plan with high priority HD video chat.

Check out Jitsi Meet, in the meantime. £Free.99!

It's not ads, that's a poor translation of an article in Spanish... from a source in English, quoting a tweet.

https://wabetainfo.com/whatsapp-is-going-to-update-their-ter...

They're copying the Telegram announcements.

This is blogspam from this source (which has an awful adblock wall)

https://wabetainfo.com/whatsapp-is-going-to-update-their-ter...

> Hey there! WhatsApp is using you.

> (...) and now a word from our sponsor

> The ads would not be sent in the form of chat, but they would appear as a kind of banner in the specific app and redirect you to external websites, in the same way they could require certain action from the user.

No surprise coming from a subsidiary of Facebook.

Didn’t Jan Khoum negotiate against ads upon being acquired by Facebook?

if I remember correctly Jan and Brian collectively left over $1B on the table rather than stay at facebook for another 1-2 years.

When you sell, you lose the upper hand. You can't make any promises or any guarantees. All the negotiations in the world won't make a difference.

Bad machine translation from Spanish to English - is there a native English source?

> In case you are not in favor of the modifications, you can delete your WhatsApp account through the configuration.

Right. I wish I could delete my WhatsApp account even before any modifications, but I still am occasionally added to message-groups for various club activities I very much care about. Fuck you.

Didn’t Jan Khoum negotiate against ads upon acquisition by Facebook?

Time to disable auto-updates for whatsapp.

WhatsApp stops working after a while unless you keep it updated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com