WhatsApp is now free: Is this a move to curb free advertising forever?
WhatsApp – the world’s most popular messaging app – which is owned by Facebook, the world’s number one social networking website, just went free! Purchased two years ago for a whopping $19 billion, it doesn’t look like the company has made much profits by charging people a fee of 99 cents, Moreover, taking under consideration the fact that most users who joined the service before the subscription fee was introduced, have been using the service free of cost since inception.
So why purchase a product for so much money, and not even try to monetise it? What does Facebook really want to do with the messaging app service?
The reason given by WhatsApp for discontinuing its annual subscription fee is that it hasn’t really worked out, as planned earlier. “For many years, we have asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year. As we have grown, we have found that this approach hasn’t worked well,” said WhatsApp in a blogpost. Despite not being able to charge its hundreds of millions of users the annual fee, WhatsApp said it would not subject its users to advertisements.
