Facebook has just paid an astronomical amount of money – $19 billion – for WhatsApp, a smartphone messaging service that charges its 450 million users $1 a year to send messages back and forth.
Look at those numbers again. Any accountant trying to make sense of them will be tearing their hair plugs out, thinking a decimal point must have gone missing. The sheer amount of money being spent makes Snapchat turning down $3 billion a few months ago look almost sane, especially seeing as Facebook is promising not to add adverts to WhatsApp, thus ruling out the main way it could squeeze more money out of users.
WhatsApp is a brilliant service – an infinitely better experience than the text messaging it is destroying – but even it it continues to grow like mad, $19bn is hard to stand up financially. But then again, I doubt that Zuckerberg sat down with a calculator and decided this made accounting sense. Buying WhatsApp wasn’t about that. Here's what it's about.
“Our mission,” Zuckerberg is fond of saying, “is to make the world more open and connected.” To translate: Your social life over the internet will be conducted via our network, whether you like it or not. Full story...
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Look at those numbers again. Any accountant trying to make sense of them will be tearing their hair plugs out, thinking a decimal point must have gone missing. The sheer amount of money being spent makes Snapchat turning down $3 billion a few months ago look almost sane, especially seeing as Facebook is promising not to add adverts to WhatsApp, thus ruling out the main way it could squeeze more money out of users.
WhatsApp is a brilliant service – an infinitely better experience than the text messaging it is destroying – but even it it continues to grow like mad, $19bn is hard to stand up financially. But then again, I doubt that Zuckerberg sat down with a calculator and decided this made accounting sense. Buying WhatsApp wasn’t about that. Here's what it's about.
“Our mission,” Zuckerberg is fond of saying, “is to make the world more open and connected.” To translate: Your social life over the internet will be conducted via our network, whether you like it or not. Full story...
Related posts:
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