The gamble on WhatsApp has finally started to pay off for Mark Zuckerberg. I remember some years ago when I heard the news that Facebook has bought WhatsApp for $22 billion. I wasn't surprised because they were trying to buy out all social media platforms that looked like Worthy competition that'll rival Facebook. I thought that was the main idea and yes it was. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to a monopoly game from his company when it came to social media since that was the biggest thing at that time, nowadays it's AI.
However the question myself and most people asked was how they planned on monetizating WhatsApp to make money. The two options was either to show ads on the App or make it a paid subscription service. Both options would have made WhatsApp worse than when they acquired it. So for about a decade they've been operating this instant Messenger without any earnings.
But now they're finally getting a way to earn from WhatsApp and they might soon profit from it. WhatsApp is now a big driver in Meta’s growth thanks to its business messaging tools. A lot of Companies are paying to message customers directly and that is driving up Meta’s non-ad revenue by 48%. Well if you look at it, it's still small compared to the money they make from advertisement, but you can't deny how impressive the growth rate is. This is just the start of something bigger. People are shifting from posting publicly to sharing privately through the DMs. This change means Meta had to rethink its revenue model making them focus more on the way people actually want to connect today.
There’s talk that Meta’s next move is to bring in AI tools to make messaging even smoother, maybe even offering paid AI services.
I think soon most businesses will be able to use AI to chat directly with customers through WhatsApp. This will make support faster and easier and that give Meta even more ways to make money.