[yarekt]

Pay for services that you use instead of forcing companies to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service?

I get it though, no one wants to pay for 100s of little free marginally useful things we use every day, but if you look back at what whatsapp did in the beginning, the £3 a year they were asking is so worth it

[rkachowski]

> forcing them to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service?

Corporate advocates love to whine about cost yet seem to be blind to the context of the situation.

Meta captures enough of the entire global spend on ad revenue to be considered the biggest player in ads, yet we should spare sympathy for the poor servers of whatsapp - famously optimised to scale to 1B users with 50 engineers - which are now compelled to resort to inserting ads in order to cover the costs to run operations and keep the lights on.

These users just don't want to pay for anything, shame on them for using free services subsidised by massive corporations that undercut the market with the explicit aim of expanding the audience and clawing it back later. It's not Meta / Whatsapp's fault that they're exploiting this situation they've shrewdly developed over years, it's the individual moral failing of each user of the service.

Meanwhile ragebait / propaganda / angry racist uncle news is free on Facebook and shared in various forms, and meaningful news + journalism is locked behind various paywalls and other costs. Why won't these people just pay???

[camillomiller]

Oh my God, thank you SO MUCH for this comment.

[avhception]

I remember when it was 1€/year. Absolutely totally worth it! And I'd gladly pay again if they would only let me!

[mrweasel]

It felt a little weird that they didn't differentiated pricing. Charging 1€ is adds a little to much overhead per transaction, and maybe not everyone has a credit card. It seems to me that an alternative would be to charge e.g. 5, 10 maybe even 20€ per year in western countries, then step the amount down depending on the economy in each region, bottoming out at e.g. 5€. Then just let the app be free in the rest of the world.

That way a user in Europe could "subsidize" 4-10 users in the developing world. Maybe that's a little to social democratic for a corporation.

[whiplash451]

They will make so much more than 1€/year/user with (y)our data.

[TheAceOfHearts]

This fails to account for network effects, where most people are already using a specific messaging app and people are unable to migrate elsewhere without sacrificing a ton of contacts. Even if someone is willing to pay, that won't magically transfer over their contacts.

In order to truly solve this problem there has to be some kind of federation and cross-platform standards so that alternatives are able to rise up and compete with big tech.

[chii]

at the beginning, they "charged" $1 (or £3 as you said), but this "fee" was often just waived. You never really had to pay it to use whatsapp. The money was there as a form of advertising, to differentiate whatsapp from the others - because by making it seem more premium via attaching a price, it makes the people using it feel more superior and thus the platform more easily propagates; and it's also why they "secretly" let you use it for free if you refused to pay.

[dontlaugh]

FWIW, £3 is closer to $4.

[lynx97]

Nah. I only use WhatsApp because friends and acquaintances of mine use it. I have NEVER had the need to send a video, nor a photo to anyone. I would be totally happy using iMessage or even SMS. The ONLY reason I have WhatsApp installed is peer pressure. No need for any of its features. No need to pay for it either.

[mrweasel]

Agreed, iMessage and SMS are both free, so why would I pay for WhatsApp again? With RCS starting to work better, I don't really see a need for 3rd. party messaging apps. I do like Signal, but honestly I don't have a need for it.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I guess it feels worth it if you actually like it.

I've always hated WhatsApp but use it due to network effect: in my country you pretty much can't have a normal social life without it (and even things like customer service often use it as well).

When they started threatening with charging money, it felt like a punch to the gut. So I'm using this product I hate because I'm pretty much forced, as I'd rather be using Telegram or various others that I strongly prefer, and now that they've captured entire societies and communities with their free app, they're going to make ME pay?

My feeling is that capitalism is just not a good model for messaging apps with network effects. Regulation is sorely needed, at the very least for interoperability (like the phone network), and maybe more.

[sebastiennight]

I think your chronology is wrong.

It is extremely unlikely that you used WhatsApp "before they started threatening with charging money" but would have preferred Telegram at the time.

Why?

1. Because WhatsApp was a paid app from the beginning ($0.99 after the first year of using it)

2. Because WhatsApp was bought by FB in early 2014, who made it free.

3. Because Telegram was founded in late 2013