How does Whatsapp make money if it’s free and there are no ads?
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It doesn’t really make much money. Meta is attempting to monetize it, but the amount of money it makes is tiny compared to Meta’s advertising business.
Throwaway and I’m late. However, I work at WhatsApp in the monetisation team. Most answers are wrong but some are in the right direction.
The real answer is WhatsApp doesn’t make money. They don’t sell your data, we have some of the strictest privacy policies in the industry (I can’t speak for Meta).
The main routes WA are pursuing to make money is Business messaging.
If you message a business, they will charge that business a few cents for the conversation.
So the big push to make money is to drive conversations with businesses.
There is no data sharing or profiling and whilst Will Cathcart is WA lead it’s 99.9% likely that won’t happen. I recommend looking up his public statements on privacy and encryption.
It might not.
WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. It prevents an instant-messaging based social network from springing up to challenge Facebook’s dominance.
WhatsApp is also incredibly cheap to run. At the time of its acquisition, WhatsApp employed just 35 engineers to support 450 million users.
Despite the $19 billion original purchase price, it provides a cheap way to guard the flank of what was Facebook’s monopoly.
Just like any other app…YOU are the product. They make money off of your data and information.
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