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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe that Metaverse would be a success, but I still think $META could be a good value buy at this point. Investors are forgetting that $META still has an asset that it has not realized the potential of—WhatsApp. The app has 2B monthly active users and many of them are non-tech savvy who would loath at the idea of switching to another app. There are ~500M users in India alone[1]. Can you believe that? 40%+ of the country actively using an app?

The advertising potential is insane. But again, it's only speculation that the potential can be realized. I do think it doesn't hurt to have one risky bet in your portfolio.

[1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/whatsapp-may...

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I think this is the right answer. Whatever disappointment may or may not exist with some of their other bets, their stranglehold on our attention continues to exist. I mean, you have really, really strong competitors like TikTok out there, and FB property usage GREW. In the developing world, Whatsapp quite literally has a stranglehold on communication -- full stop. Whatsapp for Business in a lot of countries is in its infancy... payment processing/etc. is surely a "willingness to do it" question rather than one of whether they can or not. It just sounds to me all in all like Zuck is trying to be ready to play a really long game. What all of this reminds me MORE of is the constant ridicule you'd hear out of Microsoft around mobile computing and the internet, only to realize it a bit way too late in the process that they had missed a trick. I think Zuck feels he has enough money to spend to not miss the next trick.

> The advertising potential is insane.

I doubt it.

When you chat you are focused on the interaction. Ads are a major disturbance in the flow.

When you browse facebook you are actively looking for stuff to read - ads fit in much better.

Mark claimed on the earnings call that their "pay to message a potential customer" ads on messenger are already bringing in a billion in revenue. They haven't even fully launched on whats app. While this incredibly annoying feature push people toward other messaging apps? Yes, but plenty of people will just deal with it.

Meta might be a good value buy at these prices if they launched a dividend. But their free cash flow dropped close to zero in this last quarter, so that won't be happening.

meta bought back 2% of their shares last quarter alone. They are one of the most aggressive tech companies when it comes to returning capital to shareholders.

Yes! And the monetization in this case isn’t display ads but rather charging businesses for communicating with their customers.

Yea they still have other products of course, but shoving ads into Whatsapp wouldnt go down too well, seeing as all other messenger apps dont have any ads at all.

They should have spent the $12b on researching how to monetize their existing platforms properly instead of on this metaverse nonsense.

You don’t need ads to monetize a product. Plenty of people will buy things through WhatsApp.

LINE has non-intrusive ads in their app, among hundreds of other things, everyone in Japan uses it.

It could be if they didn't reinvest everything into the metaverse. Any dollar put into that essentially didn't exist as profit, in most investors minds

But there are no ads in WhatsApp and if there were, we’d likely see people switch to one of an infinity of similar free apps.

>The advertising potential is insane.

You realize the "just slap ads on it" monetization method is going away, right? Outside of regulation (ie GDPR) and platform control (ATT), it's 2022; do people really still believe that flooding a product people love with ads won't change user behaviour?

It may work for a year or two. That's still a year or two more of insane revenue than nothing.

ads on Whatsapp?? PLEASE NO!!

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