About WhatsApp, Funding, Founders & Funders

About WhatsApp Founders : WhatsApp (WhatsApp Inc.), founded in 2010 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both ex-employees of Yahoo!

WhatsApp Funding : Funded by heavy weights like Sequoia Capital (with a meager 250K USD) who made a killing when it got acquired by FaceBook for 19 Billion USD (when WhatsApp had less than 100 Million USD in revenues). Today WhatsApp boasts of more than a Billion Users across the world on all the OS platforms and is a fully onwed subsidiary by of FaceBbook Inc. Before we move on to 'How does WhatsApp make Money', lets take a look at what the Business Model of WhatsApp is.


You Should Definitely Read this:, 'How does FaceBbook Make Money'.

Business Model of WhatsApp:

WhatsApp (messenger) is a cross platform messaging app which used to have a subscription model for its users for an annual renewal fee. Which very few people paid (hahaha), and for the rest it was being auto renewed (for free) at the end of subscription period.  This was called as ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). Consider this case, 1 Billion Users, Eevery one paying about 1 USD for renewal would generate about Ba billion Ddollars in Rrevenue per year. Other revenue lines (proposed or futuristic) include sticker sale to users, in-app advertising, promoted whatsapps, bulk messaging, and download fee.

Today the business model of whatsapp is, well none! It is a part of fFacebook which does all the money making and wWhatsaApp is just a business unit which does not generate any money. Let’s move on to how does wWhatsaApp make money (internally via transfer pricing) for fFacebook.

How does WhatsApp Make Money:

First thing to note is, that when we are online (connected to the internet) we generate some tera bytes of tera bytes of data on every moment on a daily basis. This data includes user habits of shopping, keyword research, content interests, reading interests, watching interests etc. When you send messages over wWhatsaApp, the messages first route through servers of wWhatsaApp (where they are stocked and analyzed for various content present in it) and then to the receiver. This server actually is a smart code which analyses the data based on the content used.

This data is then passed on to fFacebook for effectively putting targetting options in their ads which are priced higher than the general type of boosts (try putting a target based and the moment you try to narrow it down the price per click goes up). The things we share on WhatsApp reflect our interests, likes, dislikes.

Consider this, Llike Twitter has HashTags (#HashTag) which are often used as listening tool as to what people are saying about a trend, or a brand, Tthe WhatsApp search function on your phone acts as a listening tool for them (if they can search it on your phone, they can read and interpret it as well) and thus they know about your behavior as a person and then facebook targets the right set of ads towards you.

How WhatsApp Makes Money
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