With nearly a billion users, WhatsApp has become the second most popular instant messenger on the planet. That detail is probably enough to justify the $19 billion that Facebook paid for the platform, but since then, funding has been a big question. Finally, WhatsApp's team decided to eliminate the $1 annual subscription and said the service will remain free of advertising as before.
The end of the dollar subscription
The latest figures show 990 million users — an impressive number, but it only puts WhatsApp in second place among messengers, since its sibling Facebook Messenger takes the top spot. Zuckerberg's legion is quite happy with this dominance, however, it doesn't necessarily translate into money earned. I imagine all WhatsApp users already know this (or at least the vast majority), but from a technical point of view, the messenger is not freeware. Its subscription model required just one dollar per year, and it also allowed buying a subscription for someone who didn't have a compatible payment method. Believe it or not, that dollar a year caused controversy at the time, but users had begun to notice that the deadline kept slipping several months without any tricks or intervention.
Yesterday, the confirmation we basically took for granted arrived: WhatsApp will be a free application on all compatible devices. Jan Koum, one of the founders and current CEO of WhatsApp, explained that the subscription will be eliminated within the next few weeks, and at the same time admitted that it didn't work as well as he expected. The reason is quite simple to understand: a high percentage of its hundreds of millions of users have no access to a credit or debit card, nor are they willing to borrow one, which made the whole process very uncomfortable. When asked about the possibility of adopting advertising to fund the service, Koum gave a categorical no (which, of course, must always be taken with a grain of salt in the world of technology).
How will WhatsApp fund itself?
One of the alternatives under study is creating agreements with different companies, along the lines of banks and airlines, so that users can communicate with them more directly. In other words, WhatsApp could become a dedicated support channel or a new way to book flights. Time will tell.
