How does Whatsapp make money if it’s free and there are no ads?
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Business licensing. A lot of the “free to the public” apps/programs basically boil down to just ads or previews of the corporate product. If your employees like it and know how to use it, then it makes sense to license it for your business rather than train them on a different, possibly less featured product). MS Office use to be that way. PCs came with a “home license” of Office. People got used to how it worked, so businesses bought licenses for a product their employees were already familiar with. the other, licensed only office suites started to lose market share and just “faded away”.
They have WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business. The latter is for companies and isn’t free, but can let a company do stuff like have a bot automatically send out delivery updates to customers. There would be no reason for companies to pay for it if nobody used it, so regular WhatsApp is free to attract a large userbase. Essentially, easy access to us is the “product” of regular WhatsApp.
Selling your data. They also have a business version and stuff like that. But trust me. The data collection is their biggest profit gainer.
What data do they collect from my phone? Do they see what websites I go to or my friends, etc?
You are free to believe me or not here, but the short answer is, it doesn’t make money. Nor is user data from it integrated into Meta’s overall user data pool, like Facebook and Instagram are integrated. Nor are Meta reading your messages.
Capturing your usage. They don’t know what was in the message, but know when, where you sent a message, who to, how often. How often you receive them. How long it takes you to open it. Where the recipient is. And so on. They can build a fairly good profile from you for example if you regularly send them during the day from a location of a school they can guess you’re likely a student so can work out your age and general demographics. Tie this to others you communicate to and other areas they can often figure out your interests. For example if you also often send a message via Starbucks wifi on a Saturday they can figure out you like coffee, if others you send to also send at a similar time over the same wifi they can guess they also enjoy going for coffee.
Tie this in with your facebook and instagram (same company) on the same device, multiple by 2 billion users and you have a powerful database which can be sold to advertising companies or those doing research on people similar to you.
Facebook/meta who own WhatsApp are making money from you. They will not state what they use the data for but they are not providing a free app out of the goodness of Mark Zuckerberg’s heart.
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At the very beginning it used to cost 5 euros a year or so. But even then it wasn’t mandatory to pay. Some had to pay after using it for a year, I never had to pay anything.
They have paid for business services and they’ll sell lots of analytics data but ultimately it is very probably a loss leader for Meta to hold their share in the IM market.
When WhatsApp started they,like most startups, weren’t bothered about a business model, they just wanted to grow and hopefully get bought out or figure something out. They got bought by a massive money tree and so didn’t have to figure something out.
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