Unlike earlier days of the internet today, we have a huge number of social media or messenger company and most of these companies have some model of revenue be it from ads, premium(paid) features, or subscription model. After using certain services one can easily get how they are making money, but have you ever wondered how one of the most popular if not the most popular messaging service provider Whatsapp makes money because they don’t have ads, any premium features, or subscriptions fee? Interesting isn’t it?
Well, read on.
In the earlier days of Whatsapp, they have a subscription-based earning so if you want to enjoy the service you have to pay $1 annually. In 2014 Whatsapp was acquired by tech giant Facebook but their earning model was the same until 2016 when Facebook announced that they are waving off $1 annual charge and later introduced Whatsapp Business App and API. Whatsapp Business App lets the business create a business account on Whatsapp and become a verified user which lets them put relevant links on their profile and thus increase the reachability. Whatsapp Business is free to use but Whatsapp makes money through Whatsapp for Business API. If you don’t know what the API is then think of it as the way software or server talks for instance suppose you want to make a simple webpage that shows the current weather then you have to get the weather data from somewhere and since the weather changes all the time so it should we updated all the time for this we can use the API of say OpenWeatherMap to get the data. Now back to Whatsapp API for Business! Whatsapp makes money by API in a very unique fashion they charge the API user for slow replies. This means that the businesses will be able to respond to messages from users for free for up to 24 hours, but will have to pay a fee for every message sent after 24 hours.
Whatsapp has also introduced the payment option in the app itself(not worldwide yet) which will make them a very compelling app thus increase their revenue. Now let’s talk about the most creepy way Whatsapp makes money, back in August 2016 Whatsapp updated their privacy policy informing that some of the user’s data would be shared with the parent company Facebook to improve Facebook’s ads and products experiences or we would say that Facebook will take advantage of massive Whatsapp user data for targeted ads. Since Facebook doesn’t share the revenue breakdown of different companies it operates, we can’t talk about how much Whatsapp makes but there is no doubt with the huge user base Whatsapp has made huge money for Facebook and there is only room to grow.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my first ever blog, it means a lot to me.
Peace✌️
