Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. 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.
Why do I think Facebook doesn’t share these views.
I don’t think Facebook is dumb enough to mess with a 19 billion investment that is proven to be working.
Look at instagram, facebook has left them alone for the most part.
Mark Zuckerburg is a smart guy. I think he will understand where he can get away with advertising and where he can’t at this point. Facebook added it to the sidebar and then started to do paid in-stream posts. Instagram was not cluttered with ads as soon as Facebook bought them.
Facebook purchased WhatsApp in order to make big moves in the markets that would be huge growth for Facebook. Inserting ads, changing the data model of WhatsApp, and pissing off the WhatsApp customers would not help Facebook gain/retain users in the markets that they just paid $19 Billion for.
WhatsApp was successful because they didn’t insert ads where their competition did. Facebook would be wise to keep it that way.
The thought of Facebook having a product that is paid for as a subscription is a great way to diversify Facebook’s income.
From their Forbes interview:
“Dealing with ads is depressing… You don’t make anyone’s life better by making advertisements work better.”
Refreshing. Can’t wait to see how long Facebook can restrain itself from polluting this intent.
what a bunch of conviction-less sellouts.
you misunderstand. WA’s business wasn’t worth $19B. not even close. the thing that may be worth that is how FB feels they can exploit it.
I think you sound like Agent Moulder — YOU WANT TO BELIEVE.
Users don’t need to see ads on Whatsapp for FB to justify the $19b, but something will have to change.
I’m eagerly awaiting the article that explores how FB will maintain Whatsapp’s ad-free experience (and ephemeral nature of users’ data) while knitting together the backends. Lots of powerful data there.
the fact that they didn’t inject advertising into Instagram is a pretty good indicator that adding advertising to WhatsApp is not a given.
From my reading WhatsApp uses the users actual phone number as a user ID. Facebook asks for mobile phone numbers, so FB may just match those values and view WhatsApp as just yet another data-stream for ad targeting on Facebook.