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Comment by saidinesh5 | Hacker News Reader

Even WhatsApp.. that number was insane...

Not sure if WhatsApp paid off, though. There are reports of up to $1 billion in annual revenue with the Business API, so this is far less than what they paid. I think Meta's strategy was to create a Western version of WeChat, which has a very high ARPU, but for some reason, they never invested in it properly... They added Stories, a "Venmo" feature, and then gave up.

I think that's an example of the opposite, the number was huge but how much revenue is being driven by WhatsApp? I think that would be a hard one to put a number on. I'm sure it's important for Meta overall, but it's not directly driving ad or subscription revenue.

Whatsapp claims to be E2E encryption, but it can still submit anonymous("") metadata("") At least they can identify you and your contacts by real phone number, real name and nicknames, and more often than not real pictures; the information can be crosschecked across all your contacts who in good faith provide good information.

There are also bussiness accounts which are really important depending on the location.

It is very hard to put a price to that, but its value is undisputable.

This is exactly my point. I'm sure there's lots of intelligence that Meta can attribute value to, in a complex attribution process, but I doubt that it's as simple as a revenue stream or P&L.

That's the weird thing about WhatsApp though.. back when they bought WhatsApp it was still a paid service and a lot of people actually paid for it and it was on its way to get to a billion active users.

After that acquisition, they made it free for all and started chasing the $$$ with WhatsApp for business. And ads. No idea which is more profitable anymore. I think they'd still be able to monetize it more with WhatsApp payments and those ads in status updates. I'd definitely like to know what the numbers are looking like these days..

> it was still a paid service and a lot of people actually paid for it

It was, but it was very cheap (UK pricing was £1 a year), and I believe had lots of free users anyway. My guess is that the revenue wasn't worth pursuing.

> the number was huge but how much revenue is being driven by WhatsApp?

Meta isn't a charity. If they aren't making money off WhatsApp outright, the users are the value and they're making money off them some other way, encryption be damned.

Meta gets to spy on the communication habits and networks of half of the planet through Whatsapp. Since Meta is essentially a mass surveillance company, the acquisition makes a lot of sense.

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