Also, a more likely outcome would be Facebook charging $2 a month on top of their usual data collection practices.
No, I'm extremely critical of many aspects of Facebook (and implicitly Whatsapp as an FB property, especially now) but to say they provide so little value based on how few people would possibly pay these amounts uses flawed assumptions. If people didn't pay it wouldn't be because they don't gain at least 1 or 2 dollars in value (many people almost certainly do, I certainly do with my own use), it would be because the model of offering high value for free in exchange for massive amounts of saleable user data is so lucrative that alternatives with free versions would quickly take over market share. In absolute terms, the use value of FB or Whatsapp to a user is often much more than 1 dollar per month, but compared to the ease of switching to someone who in the existing market again offers the same for free, it could quickly descend to less than 1 dollar.
Edit: tried to google concrete numbers what revenue was back then, could not find any clear answer, because it was doing some juggling with stocks etc. https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/whatsapp-revenue/
The problem seems to be that if competing services remain free, then users might start questioning the fee and eventually the base might migrate.
Really, while "free" internet services appear as if they are straight out of a post-work utopia, all they seem to be doing is trivializing the social cost of accurate and insidious targeting of groups jazzed up in sexy terms like "digital marketing" and "adtech".
Have you actually used cellphones? They're extremely expensive to actually communicate with, especially in the countries where WhatsApp is near ubiquitous (and we're talking within country, let's not even get into how horrendously expensive communicating with people internationally can be via regular cell service).
I really don't understand why so many people on HN are this adamant about trivialising the value that apps like Whatsapp provide.
I can easily envision a world where Facebook was a nonprofit along the lines of Wikipedia. Ad-free and supported by donations, the site would serve to connect the world (Facebook’s ostensible mission) without resorting to dark patterns or A/B testing for addictive engagement. I think there are plenty of wealthy people out there who would love to support such a site, if it existed.
Technology-wise, such a site could be built today, no problem. I have no idea what to do about the network effects that comprise Facebook’s moat, however.
Really, this must come from some utopian idea that company-founders really want to make the world better above else, but then profit-seeking—the modus operandi of all for-profit companies—intervenes just because the world is not pure enough for their vision.
Most people don’t pay for air, therefore those people would be happy if their access to air was removed?
It had explosive growth despite (or to some degree because of) the yearly $1 fee.
I'd happily also paid for my kids and a number of my friends to keep them on old WhatsApp, pre-Facebook, if they needed it.
Instead they sold out.
Back of the envelope calculation suggests they make about $2 a month from each user (~$70B revenue/year divided by ~2.7B active users/month)
* Even if they didn't show you ads they have no reason to not still obsessively track you and monetize that data in other ways.
Long term, Facebook is dead. Perhaps internally they know that and are already planning for it.