Quite a few months back Facebook had announced its intention to purchase WhatsApp, one of the most popular cross-platform messaging service used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. A couple of days ago this acquisition was finally completed after review by regulators and now WhatsApp is officially owned by Facebook. Does the world’s largest social network have any plans of monetizing its new property? Apparently not in the near future.
Reuters reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made this clear today that the company has no near-term plan to make money through WhatsApp. However he didn’t reveal any plans about the future of WhatsApp and what strategy Facebook can adopt to make money off of it.
Even before it was acquired by Facebook WhatsApp had a simple business model. The app is available for free and so is the first year of service after which it just costs $1 per year to use the service which is available across a wide variety of platforms. One of the reasons why users prefer WhatsApp is because it doesn’t have in-app purchases, advertisements or sponsored deals which one can find in its rivals.
So for now WhatsApp users can rest assured that Facebook won’t be altering the user experience in any way just to monetize its new property, that is until Facebook does decide to do something, but it may take a considerable amount of time before that happens.