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Comment by hhjj | Hacker News Reader

We don't sell ads but we are selling ourselves so you can sell ads in the future.

I doubt that was the intent at the time. Sure they'd be looking for ways to monetize, but could the co-founder in 2012 have predicted what FB as an entity would become ~10 years later?

Facebook was making money from ads when they sold WhatsApp to FB. They had to know that was the plan.

I don't fault them for selling, I fault everyone else for assuming it would always be ad free after the sale.

Well, if it would been a free app, OK. But one did pay for this feature, isn't it. So I want my dollar back.

That's a fair point in general, but I think that by the time FB acquired whatsapp the writing was in the wall and I feel that the founders probably knew where things were headed.

This is the timeline as I recall it (and from quickly googling a couple of articles), feel free to correct me if I'm getting things wrong:

2012: this article

2014: FB acquires whatsapp

2016: Whatsapp becomes free (drops the $1 purchase fee)

2018: Jan Koun and Brian Acton leave FB

Yes, if someone offers to pay you $20B for your chat app, it’s not out of charity.

I’m not blaming them for selling out for $20B, I would have done the same. But I won’t believe they didn’t know what was going to happen.

If WhatsApp had no users, they wouldn't have been worth much. They didn't sell ads, they sold all their users.

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