Skip to main content

WhatsApp Abolishes Subscription Fee; Hints at Wechat-like Revenue Model

By
Whatsapp, the biggest messaging app in the world in terms of subscriber base has an important announcement to make today. Jan Koum, founder of Whatsapp told Re/Code’s Ina Fried that the chat app plans to drop its $1 subscription fee, but in reality, Whatsapp never really enforced the subscription fee. However from now, Whatsapp will remove the payment option from the app altogether. Also anyone who has made a subscription payment this year or in the past will not be getting any refund.
whatsapp
The bigger news is that Whatsapp now finally plans on becoming a platform. As we had discussed in our previous article, Whatsapp has all the things in place to become a successful platform. Today, Jan Koum has confirmed exactly that.
“It really doesn’t work that well,” Koum said Ina about the $1 subscription fee. He noted that while a buck a year might not sound like much, access to credit cards is not ubiquitous. “We just don’t want people to think at some point their communication to the world will be cut off.” This makes perfect sense considering that most countries where Whatsapp is popular such as India, credit card penetration is really low.
By becoming a platform, Jan said Whatsapp’s primary aim would be to explore ways businesses can use Whatsapp to connect with individuals, but said avoiding spam and unwanted advertising is also a top priority. Whatsapp has also noted that it won’t be introducing third party ads. Whatsapp’s main aim for now is to become help businesses connect with users in a hassle free manner by replacing the messy email threads and IVR channels that dominate customer service today.

However, it’s important to note that this is just an idea for now. Whatsapp hasn’t written even a single line of code related to this until now, so the feature might take quite some time before you start seeing it in action. Also Whatsapp hasn’t indicated how it would try to monetize this platform, while we could make many guesses, whatsapp would probably first try to get the platform right and then try to fit a monetization model that helps them get most buck while also doesn’t damage customer experience significantly.
A phenomenom that was started by WeChat and several other Asian chat apps quite some time back has been widely adopted by various chat apps this year. At its F8 developer conference, Facebook unveiled tools that would help Messenger become a platform and Uber was the first company to truly to take advantage of it from a service related prespective. Slack recently opened up its app for developers and also has fund to support developers that build on Slack. Whatsapp has now finally indicated that even it would be joining this list and if done right this could convert Whatsapp into a golden egg for Facebook.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mega List of Windows 7 Drivers

By
W indows 7 has just been released all over the world and I am sure many of you are gearing up to upgrade the OS of your PC to Windows 7. One thing which comes to my mind immediately when I think of upgrading my OS, is about the compatible drivers.
8 comments
Read more

Dash up Your WordPress Dashboard Interface

By
Do you have a multi-author blog ? Do you want to brand your WordPress dashboard with custom logo and unique interface? Then this post is for you only. In this article I am going to tell you how you can change the avatar of WordPress admin page with new style and add some cool features to it. Let’s start. Fluency WordPress Plugin Here is a WordPress plugin for you called Fluency with which you can customize your WordPress admin page according to your needs without any knowledge of PHP. Some top features of Fluency that I personally like are – Display your own custom logo at the top of the WP Menu once logged in : This is my favorite option, with this plugin you can also add your own logo on top of WordPress admin page. A good option if you’ve a multi author blog. Hot keys for menu/submenu access : Fluency provides you with features of hot keys with which you can easily open menu and submenu. Now, no need to take mouse to every menu, simply use the hot keys f...
1 comment
Read more

All Seeing Eye Chrome Add-on Runs Text Searches of Your Entire Browser History

By
W e use our browsers daily and at a certain point, we might want to find that interesting website that we accessed a few months ago. But by using the default browser history is either too difficult or almost impossible to do that. That’s why this Chrome extension is so awesome. The All Seeing Eye add-on indexes all text in your Web history, letting you run text searches. All Seeing Eye indexes all of the text of every page you visit in Chrome and even captures a screenshot of each page you visit for a quick visual search of your Web history. The default Web history tells you only the URL and title of each Web page you have visited but with the Chrome extension All Seeing Eye, your Web history expands to include all of the text of every page you have visited along with screenshots. The moment after you install the All Seeing Eye from the Chrome Web Store, the extension starts indexing all of the text of every page you visit and capturs scre...
Post a Comment
Read more