How does WhatsApp earn money? Know WhatsApp Secrets
WhatsApp is used by millions of people worldwide and the App has become a part of our life. Many questions about WhatsApp come to in our mind, so let’s find the answer to these questions . One most common question, how does the App earns money or what is the actual business model of the app. Let’s see what are the secrets of WhatsApp.
WhatsApp Founder
WhatsApp was launched in 2009. Brian Acton, the founder of WhatsApp, had applied for a job on Facebook, but he did not get a job there.
Later He started WhatsApp app and his idea was to have an app that can tell the status of a person. Well, there was no specific purpose of messaging, the purpose was that through this app, a person can tell the status like “I am traveling right now, or I am working there” etc.
After the launch of this App, its founder noticed that people are sending messages to each other by changing their status, so he came up with the idea of messaging feature in it. And at that time when texting was very expensive you could do BBM which was for Blackberry users. So at that time WhatsApp became quite popular when people saw that we can send messages for free.
In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg thought of acquiring WhatsApp, and the app was bought for $19 billion. The reason for buying WhatsApp was that this app was competitive with Facebook Messenger. Well, there were many other messaging apps, but WhatsApp was very popular and Zuckerberg felt that if we acquire WhatsApp, then there will be no competition.
The founders of WhatsApp had a clear mind that they would work on privacy. We do not care about user data. We just want to make money and we will charge our users one dollar a year to use WhatsApp. So that was the business model of WhatsApp. Although this business model could not be implemented globally, still WhatsApp was a running profitable app and hence Facebook acquired it.
And after the WhatsApp acquisition, things started to change. Initially the policy was that it would remain an independent app and its founders were told to run the app the way you want to run it. But when Brian Acton came under pressure from investors to make money, he left WhatsApp and created a new app of his own called “Signal App”. Signal App is an alternative to WhatsApp and people consider this app quite secure and quite simple as it is a non-profit app.
After 2018 which came a twist in the story of WhatsApp when Facebook took all control of WhatsApp, new schemes to make money came out here as they were launched as WhatsApp Business. How to monetize WhatsApp and how to earn money from this app. Since WhatsApp had a lot of user data. The strategy is designed in such a way that the business companies, if they use WhatsApp for their business and they can later link their websites, their Facebook page, their business, and can create a communication network. In short, a business tool was created for the user in the form of WhatsApp Business App, from then on planning done that how to make money through WhatsApp.
What is the main business model of WhatsApp?
WhatsApp business app is free if the business reply comes within 24 hours, otherwise the user has to pay for the business message. So this is one main business model of WhatsApp. Apart from this, what is going on about the ads on WhatsApp is that the user will see the ads in the WhatsApp status option.
The previous founders had made it clear that there would be no ads, no gimmicky features and we would keep the app simple. But now WhatsApp is under the control of Facebook, so there are talks of running ads in the App and WhatsApp payment method was also introduced, because the payment method was also a way to earn money. And if we talk about the data, we hope that it is end-to-end encrypted as it is said about WhatsApp. And so be it.
And many people have talked about the privacy leak related to WhatsApp and who knows what will happen in the future. Basically the App has so much control over the world that even if it stops for 5 minutes, the entire world’s communication can be affected۔ Now think if an App has such a huge amount of user data, how many ways can the App make money using that data? Well, the original idea on which this app was created does not exist.
Telegram which is giving clarity from the privacy point of view, and also “Signal app” has gained a lot of users especially when the WhatsApp privacy leak was being talked about. But in today’s date, our dependency on WhatsApp has become so much that we cannot stay away from this app even if we want to.
Although there are some markets that still remain quite difficult for WhatsApp. For example the United States. WhatsApp was never very popular in the USA because the people there were mostly dependent on text messages and now if we talk about the current scenario, Apple has such a large user base that people use iMessages. WhatsApp has got more popularity from European region, South Asia and South Africa etc. But still a huge population of the world uses WhatsApp.
So these were some of the WhatsApp secrets that you have pretty much learned in this blog and we hope that the world is not tracked by WhatsApp. Because we can’t claim but often when we send messages on WhatsApp we see some relevant ads. Well, this is a very big magic net of the Internet.
In what ways WhatsApp will earn money in the future and what else can come in the future, give your opinion. Let us know in the comments whether you are dependent on WhatsApp or thinking of using any other app for communication.
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