ICQ in 1999 had about 45 million users. There were only 248 million internet users back in 1999. That's 18% of mostly international users.
AOL was optimistic. So much so this is the actual response when they beat the street during their earning reports.
"(ICQ is) growing like a weed," said AOL President Bob Pittman. "Monetizing it" will be "relatively easy," he added.
WhatsApp has 450 million users where there are 2.7 billion internet users. 16%. Of mostly international users. Where, again, monetizing it, should be relatively easy.
But then again, why does any of this matter?
Genie's out of the bottle. The game has changed. We're playing a game of scaling now. Less than a hundred dedicated folks can change the world.
That 19 billion is a clarion call to attract even more people to what it is most of us here have been doing for decades.
If there is to be a singularity moment for the generation that grew up remembering the difference between real life and internet life, we have arrived at the internet life.
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Was offered job as employee #1. Didn't take the offer. I was 15 y/o.
The icq guys are Israeli. My parents are Israeli. I spoke Hebrew fluently. I helped them fix the broken English on their web site. Later I gave them access to my AOL account so they could take a close look at AOL's buddy list when it did launch.
They also offered me UIN (the icq #) "007". I laughed it off, didn't even know at the time what 007 meant.
Always wondered what would have been if I was a few years older, not living with my parents, able to drive, and would have taken their offer seriously. To me they really kicked off the dotcom boom and for me, my focus in startups.
Even though it's a bit sad to see things didn't really evolve much since then, the bubble bursted a little later, and those kind of eyeballs-based "business-models" collapsed. I wonder if these kind of deals are the canary of another bubble bursting?
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I imagine that in 15 years (fingers crossed) we'll reflect the same situation where we assume everyone has access to the Internet and not just several billion people :)
how do I remember that?
I have no idea, but it's still stuck in my mind to this day!
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Yes and no, they only got 20 millions in revenue last year, not even profit:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...
Also, I wonder if being bought by facebook could help reduce hardware costs by utilizing facebook's infustracture
You're assuming:
A) Their growth stays the same as it is now.
B) Users on year-long free trials will convert to paying users.
These are crazy assumptions absent years worth of data.
Not saying WhatsApp doesn't have something good going, but in what world have either of the above things ever been predictable in this short of time?
Especially to validate the claim "revenue should exponentially rise"...?
But if we discount the fact that Facebook mostly paid their own "worthless" (mostly overhyped/overvalued) stock for this overvalued Whatsapp acquisition, then maybe with an order of magnitude profit, they could recover the money somewhere between 10-20 years.
For Facebook's sake, they better hope some other new disruptive technology doesn't come along in the next 10-20 years, because they won't be able to keep this sort of acquisition strategy for long.
I've noticed some articles call Facebook/Zuckerberg "smart" for noticing Whatsapp is disrupting them - if you can call noticing a disruption so late in the game that you now have to pay $19 billion to buy it, and with almost zero expectations of recovering the bulk of the money in the next decade.
What would be much smarter is using your own engineers to build that next disruption, or at least buy the ones appearing very early in the game. Zuckerberg could've bought tens of such apps in their early days a few years ago, and he'd still be much better off today. He could've owned Whatsapp, Kik, Viber, Line, and many others for much less.
[1] - Analysis of Whatsapp's revenue and profit when it had half the user-base it has today:
http://www.quora.com/WhatsApp-Messenger/How-much-revenue-is-...
Could they, though? Facebook's DNA is information accumulation. As is Google's.
WhatsApp is the antithesis of this, and the likely outcome of this acquisition is the gradual decline of the product as people flock to whatever new, unburdened, anonymous replacement comes along.
But for a while it will boost the stock price because it keeps user engagement seemingly high.
I don't think companies have DNAs. Just idiotic managers who don't give enough freedom to teams to work outside the company's box.