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Comment by darkwizard42 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the same thing I feel when I read Meta's earnings. I continue to see growth in usage of their core properties but I don't think my entire circle touches Facebook or even Instagram nearly as much.

Whatsapp certainly isn't driving those ad dollars so it truly is remarkable how disconnected my demographic (loosely using my here) is from the overall world usage.

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You have no idea of Whatsapp's marketshare in India - all small businesses use Whatsapp for all communication and even take payments. That's a 1.4B population.

How does whatsapp make money? (At all, and how much?)

It's not possible it makes as much as the main Meta properties. It has no ads on anything people use.

It's not about money - how valuable the company is depends on how many people use it intersect how useful it is. As long as it's valuable, it's valuable.

I suspect WhatsApp has a better shot at being the "everything app" compared to Twitter.

Am guessing they want to become like "wechat"

They have a business api and take a cut of transaction fees on whatsapp pay.

And they obviously cross-reference the data with Instagram/FB to sell you stuff.

Meta does not have access to your WhatsApp chats as they are end to end encrypted.

As long as you and the recipient has encrypted backups turned on How to enable end-to-end encrypted backup[0]

[0]: https://faq.whatsapp.com/490592613091019

No, those are Backups stored in iCloud / Google Drive. Google / Apple have access to those, not Meta.

They are no longer end to end encrypted if google/apple have access

They are encrypted to your device and your device can upload them unencrypted in backups if you don't configure encryption. Plus the original argument was Meta did not have access.

Maybe not but they have all the timing info, the identities of the chat participants, and the facebook surveillance network. They also used to leak URLs pasted into the app out in order to generate previews, so they know what you’re linking to from within the app. Us they can infer way more about you than seems obvious at first.

Same in all of South America.

I have a great idea of Whatsapp's marketshare globally. I am simply pointing out the ad revenue of Whatsapp is extremely low compared to their other properties. There is simply not enough surface area in Whatsapp used for that and their business profiles etc. are not going to be outearning US users of FB/Instagram.

The world is much larger than the bubble we live in.

Or they are counting bots and other ai agents and ignoring the truth?

Ultimately advertisers want a return on their spend and it's a closely watched metric for marketers. Them continuing to spend is indicative that there's growing value in ads, ie bots/ai agents cannot be the reason for their growth.

You could argue fb and particularly twitter are incentivized to include it in their DAU counts but market cares more for revenue for large companies.

"There is no alternative"

I wouldn't put it past Google/Meta coopting corporate advertisers. Everyone makes everyone look good, by stating the best possible numbers.

Google and Meta literally represent alternative advertising products.

So do Android and iOS. They're still the primary indicators of the strength of the smartphone market. You probably can't imagine a world without advertisements or smartphones, but that's the point from the post you're responding to that you're missing. If the advertising industry looks healthy, it helps everyone by keeping investors satisfied and share prices up, even if it's a ruse. It is possible for smartphones and the concept of advertising to cease existing some day. There's a spectrum between the current reality and absolute zero, and staying as far away from zero is the goal, even once we enter an inescapable decline.

Arguably true, but that's a rather different point than "there is no alternative". There are arguments to be made about market "health" and the relative sizes of the largest players, but what the upthread comment was doing was resorting to "anti trust" shorthand that clearly doesn't apply. There may be problems with this market, but lack of competition isn't one of them.

SMEs spend a lot on advertising, in aggregate. These smaller businesses are more sensitive to lowered conversation rates and will bail early - Meta took a huge hit in earnings in the aftermath of Apple's privacy changes due to poor conversions. Advertisers didn't keep pumping money in - they stopped campaigns.

I've thought this about Facebook/Meta for so many years now, and I continue to be proven wrong time and time again.

I see friends' Meta activity in the Philippines and it's 10x what I see from friends elsewhere.

I'm not sure anyone under like 60 is frequently using Facebook as social media, but Facebook Marketplace is huge, Instagram is huge.

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