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WhatsApp Business Model: How WhatsApp Makes Money

WhatsApp, the product, has had a crazy journey, and I mean that, like literally. Started by two founders who hated advertising and were passionately pro-privacy, WhatsApp ended in the hands of Facebook — the one big tech giant that is least revered for user privacy.

While WhatsApp thrived under Facebook, growing from 450 million monthly active users at the time of acquisition in 2014 to over 2 billion monthly active users, the founders ended up leaving Facebook over disagreements on the monetization direction of WhatsApp, with one of them not even sticking around for his shares to vest.

In this piece, I will trace the journey of WhatsApp — the product, the monetization mechanisms it used early on, the ones it uses currently, and the ones it plans to use in the future. And while we do all this, we will discuss all the significant directional changes, because without all that context, just learning about ‘How does WhatsApp Make Money’ would be a waste of your time.

How WhatsApp Started?

Before starting WhatsApp in 2009, both Jan Kaoum & Brian Acton, worked together at Yahoo for 9 years, from 1998 to 2007. In the period between leaving Yahoo and starting WhatsApp, both of them even applied for jobs in Facebook but got rejected.

Brian Acton's Tweet
Source: Twitter

WhatsApp was born in January 2009, after the founders purchased an iPhone & realized that the app industry was an untapped market poised to grow. This was back when the Apple App store had only been around six months since its launch on 10th July 2008.

When the first version of WhatsApp was launched, it wasn’t even a messaging app. All users could do was update their statuses, which could be seen by other people in their network. 

WhatsApp saw an increase in user traction after Apple launched Push notifications in June 2009, allowing users to be pinged when someone in their network updated their status. Users liked this functionality so much that they began to use the app to ping one another, leading to the pivot of the app to an instant mobile messaging service.   

The messaging feature, which now lies at the core of the service, was added in WhatsApp version 2.0, after which the number of users grew to 250,000. By early 2011, WhatsApp had become a part of the top 20 App list of the Apple App Store.

As the app grew, the founders started getting attention from interested investors. However, the founders were resistant because they wanted to build an ad-free product & accepting venture money might have forced them to compromise on their values.

A 2012 post on the WhatsApp blog titled “Why we don’t sell ads” lays out why the founders disliked ads and were not keen on ad-based monetization.

At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen. 

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

Despite not being keen on taking venture money, the founders of WhatsApp accepted $8 million from Sequoia Capital in April 2011, but only after they were assured they could keep the app ad-free.

By February 2013, WhatsApp had grown to have about 200 million active users & Sequoia invested another $50 million, at a $1.5 billion valuation. But if there were no ads & there was no plan to integrate them in the future, how did WhatsApp make money in its early days?

In its initial days, WhatsApp relied on what is popularly known as the freemium business model — the product was free for a year to lure users and charged a small yearly subscription fee of $0.99 for continued service. However, many users never paid a dime to use WhatsApp because the service got renewed automatically after their free period ended. 

The Facebook(Now Meta)Acquisition

In 2014, at the time Facebook(Now META) became WhatsApp’s owner after acquiring it for $19 billion, WhatsApp had 450 million monthly active users worldwide. In hindsight, the acquisition, much like Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, not only helped Facebook hold on to its domination but also gave the company a sizeable operational advantage in the future. However, the immediate winner of this acquisition was not Facebook, but Sequoia Capital, which made $3 billion on an investment of around $58 Million.

In case you’re thinking about why WhatsApp’s founder went ahead with the deal, one of the reasons was that Facebook was to allow WhatsApp to operate independently & pursue its vision. Here’s what the founders wrote on the WhatsApp blog after the acquisition, 

Today we are announcing a partnership with Facebook that will allow us to continue on that simple mission. Doing this will give WhatsApp the flexibility to grow and expand, while giving me, Brian, and the rest of our team more time to focus on building a communications service that’s as fast, affordable and personal as possible.

Here’s what will change for you, our users: nothing.

WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can continue to enjoy the service for a nominal fee. You can continue to use WhatsApp no matter where in the world you are, or what smartphone you’re using. 

And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product.

WhatsApp Becomes Free for All Users

The next big turn of events in the WhatsApp story came in January 2016 when the service was made free for everyone. In the same blog that announced WhatsApp would no longer charge money to users, the founders of WhatsApp laid out the new vision for monetizing WhatsApp, which expectedly didn’t feature ads.

Naturally, people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today’s announcement means we’re introducing third-party ads. The answer is no. 

Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. 

We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam.

Facebook Begins to Leverage WhatsApp Data

2016 was an eventful full year for WhatsApp. After making WhatsApp free for its users, WhatsApp implemented end-to-end encryption in April 2016, which in simple terms meant nobody, not even WhatsApp would be able to read the content of users’ messages. 

The Facebook power grab finally came in the form of a WhatsApp privacy policy update in August 2016, informing users that some of their data would be shared with the parent company Facebook.

Explaining why the privacy policy was being updated, WhatsApp wrote in a blog post, 

“By coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you’ve never heard of. You can learn more, including how to control the use of your data, here.” 

With WhatsApp having operated independently for two years after the Facebook acquisition and with no plan of ads being displayed on WhatsApp, the privacy update move was more about Facebook trying to cash in on the acquisition and less about WhatsApp being able to track user metrics and fight spam.

The only silver lining in this episode was that WhatsApp confirmed that end-to-end encryption was still in place, and neither WhatsApp nor Facebook would be able to see user messages.

The Founders of WhatsApp leave

When Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, not only were the founders promised that they could operate independently, Zukurberg even assured the founders that they would have zero pressure on monetization in the next five years. However, the pressure to monetize came earlier than promised, leading to disagreements over how WhatsApp was to be monetized.

While Facebook wanted to implement ads in WhatsApp, an app that had unequivocally been anti-ads, Brian proposed moving towards a metered-user model, wherein users would be charged after a certain number of messages were used. 

Brian’s proposal was rejected by Facebook, which led to him leaving in Sep 2017, without even waiting for his shares to vest, losing $850 million in the process. Jan Koum, followed suit, leaving in April 2018, after waiting out his vesting period. 

So how does WhatsApp currently make money?

WhatsApp currently primarily makes money through two sources: WhatsApp for Business and WhatsApp Pay. WhatsApp also generates indirect revenue from ‘Click to WhatsApp ads’ which redirect users from Facebook to WhatsApp. WhatsApp has stayed away from in-app advertising since the time it abandoned its original freemium model.

Let’s have a look at both the current revenue sources of WhatsApp individually to understand them better.

1. WhatsApp For Business

The WhatsApp Business App helps businesses serve customers on WhatsApp, with provisions to create product catalogs as well as provide customer support. While the Business App is free to use, WhatsApp monetizes the service through the WhatsApp for Business API. Only a month after the launch of the WhatsApp Business API, big tech companies like Netflix, Uber & Wish & 100 others had already started testing the service.

In the early days of the WhatsApp for Business API, WhatsApp made money by charging registered businesses for slow replies. Businesses were allowed to respond to messages from users for free for up to 24 hours but are charged a fee per message for delayed responses, which varied by country.

The new WhatsApp for Business API allows the first 1000 conversations to be free but after that, businesses have to pay a fixed amount per conversation, which varies by country.

2. WhatsApp Pay

In recent years, WhatsApp has shown a strategic bent toward monetizing the app through businesses, and WhatsApp Pay is another testament of the same. While WhatsApp Pay is a free service for the end-users, businesses are required to pay a flat 3.99% fee per transaction. At the time of writing, WhatsApp Pay is available only in India and Brazil.

3. Indirect Revenue from ‘Click to WhatsApp ads’

Apart from WhatsApp For Business & WhatsApp Pay, WhatsApp also makes money through Click to WhatsApp ads, which are not ads shown on Facebook, not WhatsApp, but these ads redirect users from Facebook to WhatsApp.

Since these ads are not shown in the WhatsApp app, attributing the revenue of these ads entirely to WhatsApp would be incorrect, but it is one of the ways in which Facebook leverages WhatsApp to increase revenue.

How much money does WhatsApp make?

Nobody knows how much revenue exactly WhatsApp generates except Facebook because the parent company does not share the revenue breakdown of the different products it operates.

According to Facebook’s 2014 Form 10-Q, in the nine months prior to September 30, 2014, WhatsApp had generated a paltry revenue of $1.28 million, but that was way back when WhatsApp was charging users a $1 per year fee after the first year. 

In a Jan 2016 post, Forbes had predicted that WhatsApp’s average revenue per user would be $4 by 2020, which could yield revenue of around $5 billion for Facebook.

But the estimates were off because they assumed WhatsApp would reach 1.3 billion total monthly users by 2020 — which WhatsApp had acquired by midway through 2017. 

In November 2017, Forbes upped the revenue estimates for WhatsApp, ranging from $5 billion to $15 billion, with the average revenue per user ranging from $4 to $12. 

With WhatsApp’s earning potential far from being realized even as of now, the product can be expected to have an increased contribution to its parent company’s baseline revenue in the coming years.

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How Does WhatsApp Make Money
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How Does WhatsApp Make Money
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WhatsApp currently primarily makes money through two sources: WhatsApp for Business and WhatsApp Pay. WhatsApp also generates indirect revenue from 'Click to WhatsApp ads' which redirect users from Facebook to WhatsApp. WhatsApp has stayed away from in-app advertising since the time it abandoned its original freemium model.
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Muaaz Qadri
Muaaz Qadri
A Proud Computer Engineer turned Digital Marketer