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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

Whatsapp is pretty much the cornerstone of personal and business relationships here in India. I’ve closed more deals over Whatsapp than over phone calls and emails and Zoom calls combined.

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And WhatsApp before Facebook famously ran on a tiny budget of humans and money per user.

Exactly. WhatsApp was fine before Facebook, and will be fine after Facebook. They only acquired it to stifle competition.

Same in Brazil. WhatsApp outages become the main national news when they happen, because it became so fundamental in everyday's life.

It is not just people talking to each other, several business rely almost completely in WhatsApp around here.

I think pretty much Europe + Africa + LatAm + Asia (minus East Asia) is using WhatsApp as defacto personal/work/business communication platform. Even in govt. domain.

IG is also still the top social media as well globally.

this just reminds me how US centric some of us default too, myself included.

I've never used Whatsapp, but I understand it's popular in some countries (to the point of being a de facto common communication medium like we'd use SMS for in the US), but how is it monetized?

> but how is it monetized?

Banks that use WhatsApp for customer support, or restaurant chains that take orders via WhastsApp bots, pay WhatsApp partners for API access.

The payment goes to the WhatsApp partner. What I'm not sure is, if it is distributed between Meta and the WhatsApp Api provider.

I assume Meta gets their pound of flesh somehow or another, but I really just wonder if it's a good business. Famously, Twitter seems like a terrible business (and that's independent or whether you think it's a useful messaging/microbloging/whatever service).

It’s likely not a very profitable business. Very limited scope to advertise on private messaging without really pissing off your customers. Whatsapp has opened up the API and I’m already getting sick of spam messages from businesses abusing the API.

I reckon its a bit like email. Great as a top of the funnel customer acquisition tool. Not that great from a money making perspective.

Same in Mexico and probably Spain too.

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