Facebook buying Whatsapp for $16 billion
 

Wonder if they'll just shut down WhatsApp altogether and merge them to Messenger...

Edit: Luckily not;



http://www.businessinsider.com/faceb...hatsapp-2014-2

.................................. holy shit.

Read this tidbit on their site....well, let's just say, "Money Talks"

http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2...dont-sell-ads/

Smart guys, don't sell ads, build a larger base of clients/end users who love no ads. Amass #1 text app, sell to Facebook for 16 billion, so facebook can sell ads/collect more data. Genius.

Oh god facebook integration with whatsapp....

Will be interesting to see what FB has planned/envisioned for Whatsapp and how they'll make money off of it/make a return on this huge investment.

Facebook wanted to buy snapchat for 4 ish billion last year. Another top ranked mobile app.

It all comes down to "committed" end users who use/interact with these apps on a regular basis.

Last quarterly earnings for FB showed something like 55% of their revenue was from Mobile Ads. It's like all the other ads on various apps but you have a top ranked app, that users spend what? over 1-3 minutes on, texting back and fourth. Add in algos to connect with your facebook platform, searches, and info from Whatsapp, you have better targets and ad optimization, thereby, marketing companies & regular companies will pay a higher ad fee. That's my guess.

They're planning to keep it as a stand alone app, like Instagram

Stats/facts

400 million active users

20 billion messages per day, double Facebook’s daily message traffic.

snapchat is sucha simple idea, (altho I dont know how to program it) IF only I hired someone to program it.

FUCK I WOULD BE ROLLING HARDER THAN MAINLAND KIDS.

I really hope they don't mess around with Whatsapp...

and if they do, I hope BBM gets better so I can switch over. BBM imo was a terrible experience for me. I tried to hang onto BBM as long as I could because I used to be a berry user, but there were just too many bugs and dislikes with BBM deleted it and switched back to Whatsapp.

Do any of you prefer BBM over whatsapp?

My biggest dislikes with BBM were:
- Chat screen was too small when you were replying, you couldn't see as much text as you can with whatsapp
- sending picture/video messages were such low quality and there was no way to change this
- bug where I would pull down a notification for "Maggy" and BBM would open my convo with "David"
- BBM icon was on my notification permanently (though, I can't remember if this was removable or not)

So how soon until FB puts ads in Whatsapp?
Posted via RS Mobile

That is a lot of money.

I've moved as much to Hangouts as I can, except some friends still prefer to to use Whatsapp (as well as relatives from overseas). I'm sure for the die-hards, they won't care if ads suddenly show up at the bottom of the screen.

16 billion... that is a lot of hookers and blow

then they're gonna buy bbm too and wechat

Now they have all our chat history.....

It's really unbelievable how much some of these tech companies are worth.

$19 billion seems overpriced for whatsapp....

450million active users, assume they all pay, thats only 450 mn a year...

no ad revenue
no corporate income
limited user info they can sell to third party (since they're not allowed to spy on users, as far as i know)
no patent value
no engineering talent (only ~50 employees at whatsapp)

not to mention wechat is the the leading messenger app, this one's a head-scratcher for me

Do you have a chart outlining WeChat being the top app? Is it just the fact that everyone in China uses it?

The valuation seems over-inflated, which is what I'm gathering from all the tech news sites that have written about it. But there is very little in terms of apps that have that many active users. That many users and their data is seemingly worth $16B to FB. I guess FB really wanted Whatsapp

+1.

Ad revenue is the huge question mark for these companies and how or if they'll ever turn a profit. And it looks like instead of innovating from within, FB has decided to just buy up other companies. It's not a path you want to go down, Yahoo learned the hard way that overpaying for online properties over the years to hide your weak revenues doesn't work.

whoops. you're right, whatsapp IS the leading messenger.... however, WeChat seems further down the path in terms of generating revenue (games, stickers tied to the messenger i believe)

WeChat now has 272M monthly active users around the world



google is doing it right, buying startups while they're young, devouring potential competition while diversifying its business
only $17bn spent on acquisitions the past 2 years and instead they have a basketful of tech companies from robotics to AI

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/wh...nies-1.2537110
(i think this article forgot about motorola though)

Wow, that's absurb... on the highest level.

Just make your own app.

I don't see how FB shareholders are ever going to get their money back on this acquisition.

Entertaining to see all the commentary on the purchase, though I do agree that the amount paid is definitely surprising/nobody would've placed that price/valuation on WhatsApp, I'm sure Facebook had to do some serious calculations/DD for such a huge investment. Nevertheless, will be interesting to look back on this in a few years.

kind of like the .com days when companies paid ridiculous amounts of money for a web addy

and watch it burst. I still don't get this whole ad thing. I have never ever click on an ad on fb........... Not really sure how it actually works.