Whatsapp has announced that their messaging service is now free. They will no longer charge $1 per year as they intended to do, they are coming up with a new business plan.
In my line of work. This line of work, we usually say “if you are not paying for the product, then YOU ARE THE PRODUCT”
This is exactly Whatsapp’s next line of play. Rather than charge me $1 per year to talk to my family and friends, they will try to use me to make money over the year. Google makes about $5-$10 per internet user per year! (I bet some of my readers never knew this). Similarly, in Whatsapp’s version of future events, they can “easily” generate $5-$10 per Whatsapp user. (Whatsapp is fast approaching 1 billion users, do the maths)
This will be much more profitable than charging us $1/year.
They are still committed to not running adverts on Whatsapp and they are still very much going to lock out spammers, we end users will still get a valuable and rich experience. While they will be able to generate enough money to keep the service free and put some money in their pockets too.
Everybody wins.
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Watching The World
- You can tell MTN’s new CEO that if the network keeps nagging me to go and re-register my sim after I already did, amma port over to NATCOM. NATCOM? Yeah… They bought NITEL/MTEL in 2014 and are (finally) ready to roll out services in March 2016.
