Why we don't sell ads – WhatsApp Blog
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A simple example is you are talking to a few friends on WhatsApp about booking a holiday somewhere, you talk about locations, dates, prices, etc. all in private, now Facebook can take all that data and using their massive Facebook tracking system start advertising offers for hotels in the places you are looking at going, shops you often mention that sell clothes for your holiday, travel insurance, etc, etc.
You don't need to stick ads IN the app to monetise it. In fact keeping it clean and ad free is the best thing to do as it keeps your users happy and using your app more which in turn leads to more and more data collection.
I think the $1 a year thing is a load of crap that is used to distract people away from the whole "if it is free you are the product" idea. If WhatsApp looks like it is not free because you have to pay $1 a year then psychologically you "trust" it more because it is something you pay for rather than something that is analysing every thing you ever say to build a better advertising profile. Also has anyone actually ever paid that $1? I don't know anyone who has, they always get some "promotion" that gives them another year free for being a loyal WhatsApp user.
Edit: Link -- https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard
From a wired article about it:
"Textsecure has actually already been quietly encrypting Whatsapp messages between Android devices for a week. The new encryption scheme means Whatsapp messages will now travel all the way to the recipients? device before being decrypted, rather than merely being encrypted between the user?s device and Whatsapp?s server."
Exactly. I'm always surprised when people think it's the ads themselves that matter. It's the behavioural data and profiling that's valuable. With that information, you can place targeted ads elsewhere.
I'm sure most users still don't realise that WhatsApp is an FB product now.
1- They somewhat are able to read my browser history even when I have ABP with "Fanboy's Social Blocking List" and a selective JS blocker installed.
2- They read my whatsapp messages.
Lately I had added a couple new contacts to my phone's agenda, and now facebook shows me these in the "people you may know" emails
it's clear to me that they had already started the data capture
>"When a logged-in Facebook user visits a site with Facebook social plug-ins, Facebook receives the Facebook ID and browser ID, along with the URL of the page being visited,"
quote from a The Verge article:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/31/8319411/facebook-tracking-...
In this case the customer is motivated to use the coupon because they have a discount and their friends are more likely to come because they trust the poster.
First time I've seen this method was in China but I would not be surprised if it were actually quite common (haven't seen in in Europe so far though)
Via email is fine, mostly because it's expected that I'll be spammed. But it'd feel much more intrusive if my friends started texting me stupid codes to save 5% on their burrito.
Until they realize it's just spam. Or they already know it and simply ignore such messages (e.g. LinkedIn recommendations, automatic invitations from random websites parsing your contact list...).
One rare instance where this seems to work (at least partially) is when both sender and receiver share some benefit from the advertisement, e.g. as when mobile phone operators offer discounts for inviting new users, both to the current user and to the newly invited one. So, if your coupon might get me some future discount should I go to that restaurant, then yes, maybe I'd consider it...
As I recall, it wasn't very popular with the recipients of the ads.
Selling your product to users is, in my view, a far more ethical monetization strategy than selling your users to advertisers, and tends to result in far less potential conflicts of interest.
That said, I also believe communication in general is too important to be left to proprietary software, which is why I won't be using WhatsApp anytime soon.
Even if you could run this app by charging users just 50c, it would fail and get beat by an app that was free.
The people I want to talk to most need to have it.
> If everyone needs to have it it needs to be free.
Or at a cost they're willing to pay.
> Even if you could run this app by charging users just 50c, it would fail and get beat by an app that was free.
Assuming of course that the other app could sustain itself.
I don't understand your argument. SMS worked just fine for a long time and is still used, yet it costs money either monthly or per message. Telephone calls cost money. Sending letters costs money. I'd hardly count those as failures when it comes to messaging mediums.
People do not want to use another messaging service, there are already too many. WhatsApp was one of the first and came in time where connectivity got barely good enough to support the service, that gave them a huge advantage.
Well not everyone (the first one was sent 7 years after the first mobile phone call). And if you want to consider it to be everyone, then it's an example of something where everyone has it yet it's not free.
> People do not want to use another messaging service
No, and therefore you need to offer something better to make up for the annoyance of changing.
I understand your point, it's the clearest example of a network effect and given two identical products the cheaper should be more attractive. However, this doesn't mean it has to have everyone and has to be free. Those are beneficial, but not absolute requirements.
Right now, I'd pay money for a decent messaging service with push & pull, with a simple API that supports sending images. It doesn't even have to have many users, I simply want this service at the moment and will pay money for it.
There's a lot more opportunity to do messaging between businesses and individuals (eg. customer service) as well -- see messenger for business.
Not saying Facebook isn't out to sell ads, just that there's probably a lot of reasons that Facebook might want WhatsApp's technology and team. Especially as they try to move more conversations onto their platform and reach out into other markets.
It's the messaging app that the most people are using. It's used for updating groups of friends, sharing photos and all the other stuff that Facebook needs to be The Place for. It also has a simple, organic-ish mole for deciding who sees what and when that intuitively makes sense to people. IE, you don't have to twiddle with circle settings to find the nexus of friend-work and professional-friend that should see your message. Instead it just has groups that start out as "who wants to watch the fight at the bar" and sometimes people keep posting to them.
Whatsapp could have pivoted or been acquired for directly competing with Facebook.
I've always considered it as a defensive play rather than a positive one - Facebook have this beautifully well-entrenched network effect that defends their position - their unique selling point is that they know the world's social graph, and it's terribly difficult for anybody else to try to build that data as long as Facebook provides an acceptable alternative to any new communication medium, because it's always going to be easier to engage with your friends on a platform they already use.
In WhatsApp's case, though, Facebook screwed up - they didn't offer a mobile messaging service that was convincing enough to take the easy victory that their position should have given them in that market, and that chink in their armour let WhatsApp build a social graph and a toehold in the space that could have made them a true competitor, so Facebook paid to make the mistake go away.
More seriously though, the value of knowing the world's social graph is certainly more complicated than I feel qualified to talk about, but it's pretty evident that it has value to advertisers, which is really what's important.
226.0901B United States Dollars as of this moment.
> post about hating advertising
you can cut the irony/hypocrisy with a knife. what's next? a post about how he loves client interoperability? heh.
Any references for this? I've been using Whatsapp for years and never saw them do this. I've spammed people, in person mostly, to install it back when Whatsapp wasn't ubiquitous where I lived yet, but that's it. I assume that's not what you meant.
Sure, WhatsApp isn't selling ads TODAY, but you better believe it's coming. You don't shell out $19B for a 'defensive play'.
Facebook have been bying all kinds on successful tech companies that don't have any relevance to the Facebook social network ad service, like the Oculus Rift. Not every company keeps selling one single thing forever you know?
Yes and they are better. i'm using Hangouts, Telegram and Line... why should I use WhatsApp? These App all have more functionalities and are "free".
I dislike to use something closed source like Whatsapp, but it's not like Hangouts, Telegram or Line are much better (almost no one I know is connecting to Google's servers with XMPP, and Telegram doesn't have an open source server implementation)
I started to use Telegram recently, thanks to my Ubuntu phone, but I don't like the fact that it's storing the messages unencrypted server-side. Whatsapp is much better on this front, since everything is encrypted by default, and usage across multiple devices (i.e. desktop) is handled wonderfully by the webapp.
OTOH, neither Whatsapp nor Telegram afaik give you any way to verify the identify of the other person, and E2E encryption without identity verification is of dubious utility... TextSecure is nice, but it has only barely more users than Telegram
My general take is that if you need advertising to monetise your product, then maybe your product isn't as good as you think it is. Most newspapers are a good example of this, if you need a ton of ads on your website to make money, maybe your not doing a good enough job providing news that people are willing to pay for. As service become more and more depended on ads, the quality of the product starts to take a back seat and in the end you end up with click bait.
Google might be an exception, they seem to have found a mix that people can live with, or perhaps they're just really good at hiding ads in plain sight.
If only hangouts was more like the good old google talk. Line is starting to look like a social network, same with Kakao. I don't want stickers i just want no frills messaging.
Whatsapp prides itself as being like SMS, and that's exactly what i want, but without the expensive SMS rates(for us from Africa & Asia)
On the contrary, people here are ready to see obtrusive ads and avoid paying anything, because "free" is better.
I like ads, they make the internet frictionless. I don't need to worry about what I've paid for -- everything just works in return for giving up a little bit of my screen.
I discovered Atlassian through ads and I really like their products, I assume those were targeted -- so if anything I've benefited from tracking.
Maybe I'm a sheep, but I like easy - and I like that the people providing me with articles, how-tos, etc get paid for doing that. I have yet to see a viable alternative to ads for a low friction internet -- people using adblock are, in my opinion, bringing us closer to the tiered internet than cable mergers ever will.
How I would do it was by distributing keys to devices at login and let friends use a users public key to encrypt messages to him.
Now you pack that encrypted message in a metadata envelope, send to server to be later retrieved by the owner.
The keys should never leave the device.
That was the plan from day 1 (imho).