Whatsapp waved off $1 subscription to make and established it as a synonym of Instant Messaging.
The question of how Whatsapp earns money has been in the minds of everyone ever since the beginning. People give different answers to this question, here we are telling you, how exactly Whatsapp is earning Dal (Pulses) and Roti (Breads) for their employees.
Founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton started Whatsapp as a status update application which was further updated to Whatsapp 2.0 which transferred into an instant messaging application.
The Facebook-owned IM application now provides services to more than a billion people across the world. Whatsapp has proudly expressed its views against the native advertisement and has not been charging the users for a long time. The developers must have some big plans regarding the revenue model of the app.
How Whatsapp makes money?
The founders of Whatsapp hated advertisements and created an add-free platform focusing on great user experience and interface. They wanted to create an app through which messaging could be easier and cheaper. But at the same time, they had to earn Dal and Roti so they came up with a paid version of the application where they charged an annual fee of $1 from the users.
After getting investments of 60 million from Sequoia Capital, Whatsapp waved off the $1 subscription fee. The strategy of the founders was to position the brand as a synonym for an instant messaging application. The strategy worked and later the company was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in February 2014. All the employees were put to Facebook payrolls including co-founder Koum, who is now a part of Facebook’s board.
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Facebook uses Whatsapp as a user data generation factory but also introduced some really strategic users to build their business profile and become a verified business on Whatsapp. The verified businesses can make their business profile along with certain important links to their Facebook page or website, set up autoresponders and even link landline numbers with Whatsapp. The business accounts can also be integrated for Business API with their product offering. Whatsapp had announced earlier that it will collaborate and charge businesses and organizations that users want to hear from, to let them message users from Whatsapp.
Currently, the plan of Facebook is to use Whatsapp’s data as much as it can and gather the behavioral information, conversation patterns, live locations and the entire contact list on the mobile phone. These data will help Facebook in even better-targeted advertising. We know how important data is in the modern world, even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledges it. He recently said that Data is the new oil.
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