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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Also Facebook completely blew its original "what are my friends doing?" market. Very few people use it for that anymore.

It still has some value - Groups and Marketplace are pretty popular, and a decent number of businesses use it as their website. But it doesn't really have the "all my friends use Facebook" moat anymore. That's moved to Whatsapp (at least in the UK).

(And yeah Meta own's Whatsapp too, but Whatsapp is not really monetised at all.)

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Well it’s not entirely accurate to say few people use it for that anymore. It has 2.9 billion monthly active users on the platform, so even a fraction there for “what are my friends doing” is more than the population of most countries. I think it’s just limited to demographics not overall represented on HN, for instance

WhatsApp monetization comes through the business offerings. Increasingly, you can use that to interact with companies, small and large

> WhatsApp monetization comes through the business offerings. Increasingly, you can use that to interact with companies, small and large

Yeah I know that's their plan (basically trying to copy WeChat) but does anyone actually use it? I haven't heard of a single business in the UK using it yet.

I’ve interacted with a few businesses in the UK already, and way more in Asia/Middle East. Forgot to add there’s also WhatsApp Pay which, while limited to only India and Brazil, is still a sizable population. It’s monetized through the fixed fee charged to the business that you pay.

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