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You do if you’ve been acquired for $19 billion. The founders couldn’t have been naive enough to think that Facebook and its shareholders didn’t have a need to monetize such an enormous investment. Facebook is not a charity, it’s a business.


Facebook monetizes Whatsapp by limiting its growth. You can easily think of all the “social” functionality Whatsapp could have added in competition with FB and Messenger.


Facebook paid 19 billion to buy up competition, as WhatsApp was a threat to the Facebook ecosystem.


That is what I am seeing now here in India, folks in my circle barely post anything to facebook now, all pictures, status messages are on WhatsApp now.


If FB pays $19B for every messenger competitor that gets traction, that's a huge incentive to make more of them.


There are network effects at play; so once a messenger has locked-in most users, it's extremely hard for newcomers to gain sustainable traction.


yeah but now you have to compete with WhatsApp to get that traction, so maybe a hard slog.


And if FB shut down WhatsApp, users will be looking to go elsewhere, and probably not FB Messenger.




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