WhatsApp is ad-free to date. Most of the money that the founders made initially was through the price on which WhatsApp was put on. There was an initial fee to buy the WhatsApp app on app store & an annual fee of $1 for Android users. Until the takeover from facebook happened, especially in the initial years, this was all WhatsApp’s income as most of the programming was being outsourced for a fixed price. It was free for many countries for the first year. Then the user had to pay $1 every year. This was kind of a loophole as many people from other countries changed their country selection in the app store or play sore & downloaded WhatsApp for free. If you multiply that with 450 million users (before acquisition), it adds up to a decent amount of money.
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Back in 2004, when Zuckerberg was about to give up on Facebook & was looking for investors for another called WireHog, Sequoia capital contacted him & asked him for a presentation. Since Zuckerberg had already partnered with Sean Parker, the brains behind Napster, he thought Sequoia won’t like it since Sequoia had invested in Parker’s ideas & that resulted in a bad loss. Having no hopes of any further establishment, Zuckerberg deliberately came late for the meeting, that too in his pyjamas & presented a ppt titled “top 10 reasons why should you not invest” & that had some funny points. That didn’t go well with the Sequoia group. Ironically in 2014, life took a full circle on Zuckerberg who had to pay $6.4 billion to Sequoia who were 40% stakeholders of WhatsApp which he took over for worth $19 billion.
Having that many active users, it is going to get you something fruitful eventually. With inter-linking with Facebook & Instagram, the app would return a lot more than just money. In Zuckerberg’s own words, “Once we get to being a service that has a billion, two billion, three billion people one day, there are many clear ways we can monetize”. After all, having founded the world’s best social media platform Facebook and having acquired world’s best photo sharing platform Instagram, it was time for Mr Zuckerberg to acquire the world’s best instant messaging app. Combining all three of them, Mr Zuckerberg will have over 2 billion active users.
