It is done. WhatsApp ceases to be payable. As we can read on the official blog of the company, with the increasing popularity of instant messaging it decided to abandon the subscription model. So far, after a year of use WhatsApp had to pay annual fee of less than a dollar. Although virtually no expense, no doubt he would bring the company steady and rather considerable revenue. However, application developers decided to abandon this small fee, because, as explained
… we thought this approach [charge] is not the best. Many of the users of WhatsApp does not have a debit or credit cards and fears that he will lose the ability to communicate with friends and family. Therefore, in the coming weeks we will remove the charges from the different versions of our application and WhatsApp will no longer receive fees for our services.
Why this decision?
The official reason given by WhatsApp emphasizes, of course, the fear that some users will not be able to communicate with your friends. Rather, we can put between a fairy tale to think that it is a so empathetic approach. We can only guess that when you start a subscription after a year of use, a high percentage of users abandoned application in favor of free competition. For this company could not afford, especially since there is no shortage of alternative products with virtually identical suitability. It was therefore decided to find another source of income. What?
See also: WhatsApp will have a video call?
Microsiervos via . Flickr
How not to subscribe, then what?
According to the terse blog post, WhatsApp is preparing to test a new feature, which is intended to facilitate communication companies with users. As if it did look like? Let’s assume that we want to get the message, for example, about spóźnieniach trains. To receive them we will begin to observe proper channel, and the railway company will be sending us a message in this topic. Maybe it will be even bidirectional communication . Of course WhatsApp for this option will be “obfuscating” company, not us. To what extent will also affect what content will be for us to reach and from which companies, it is still a matter of the future.
It is not difficult to imagine also that WhatsApp will turn towards greater “platformowości” and thus the model, which has long offered Line and the recently introduced Zuckerberg in his Messenger. Sales of stickers, skins and type of such things is not difficult to implement, and is profitable.
Interestingly, WhatsApp swears that it will not introduce advertising, at least not those in the form of banners, so although for this we free.
What it will differ from the Messenger?
WhatsApp has gained its popularity actually with one approach – simple . The application did not offer bells and whistles, just a simple tool for writing, uploading pics and video, to act quickly and on multiple systems. From the time when it was bought by Facebook for $ 19 billion, the app more and more “swells” of new features. Some of them, like VoIP or future video chat seem to be the natural course of things.
Anto Jularic
However, the new plans for monetization of applications suggest that it will be walked through, which is currently going Messenger. The problem for the future may be to identify the application. If this “platformness” WhatsApp will remind the direction in which he went Messenger, and which defines the line, what exactly will this app different from the competition?
Personally, I think that although in the short run may be able to ” pull “more of these 900 million users , than with a simple subscription (micropayment games here are a perfect example), this time you may find that once again you will need a new Whatsapp – simple, fast, light. A dollar a year is a small price to pay something.
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