BIG DATA
Apart from all kinds of assumptions of revenue from advertising and so on, actually number one targeted by social media applications such as WA is BIG DATA.
Try to imagine what you can do if you have data on billions of the world's population. Then the data will continue to be updated in every second.
Starting from information on age, location, behavior, consumption patterns and thousands of other types. Try to guess, who in the world knows the most exactly how many friends you contact most openly or secretly? Certainly not your boss or wife. Because Whatsapp knows the most. Your communication traffic is recorded with exact on their server. Whatsapp acts as a "Data Miner" which will absorb any information related to you. And in this era, the most valuable information.
So let us not naively assume that Whatsapp is a free application that hasn't got anything. Because actually every day you give an update to their database. A data about yourself and everything related to you is very valuable.
ADDITIONAL:
Because there are several questions, then I add a few things that we can see from the data that WA can take.
Location. With location data, WA can analyze many things from us. Starting from homes, workplaces, malls that are most frequently visited, do we often go abroad, etc ... etc. Our Phone Book. There WA will know who we are connected to. Starting from friends, salons, beauty advisors, our children's schools ... etc ... etc ... the Quorawan with the data analysis profession can explain further ...
Answered by: Abi famasya
Actually no one can answer this except business people from Facebook themselves. But let's try our own analysis.
The digital world business model is unique. A product must be projected to get a profit, but not necessarily get a profit on the first day. For me WhatsApp is one of them.
Let's look at the popular startup metrics: AARRR.
Why do I consider WhatsApp as a startup? Because for me WhatsApp hasn't found the right business model. Why use AARRR? Because this metric is one of the easiest to understand.
Source: AARRR (Startup Metrics) - StartitUp
In the metric, it is clear that the first step of product launching is user acquisition. Once the user has been obtained, the next PR is to make the user use the product. These two things are very important to do before stepping on the next steps.
Has WhatsApp done it? Of course. They have a strong market positioning as a simple short message service.
This makes the third step easier: retention.
Unlike similar services, the convenience of WhatsApp has made many people fall in love. Without a username, without an email signup, and only through the cellphone number WhatsApp provides the normal performance of short messages.
The effect is that retention is very strong. People who use WhatsApp will use it again and again.
Then what's the next step? Of course monetization.
But - according to me - since Facebook was purchased until now, WhatsApp has not yet wanted to do this monetization stage.
How come there are words "since Facebook was bought"?
Because the WhatsApp business model used to be embryo: pay $ 1 per year. But since it was bought by Facebook, it seems they are focusing on growth user before entering monetization. Turn to the retention stage.
They chose to make WA as a platform to be installed on every cellphone.
The result? Let's look at this graph.
The growth of WhatsApp is constantly growing. With increasing features, user engagement is even higher.
With strong engagement, WA use cases are increasing. Facebook has smartly made WA launch WA stories, make it more personal, etc. Users don't want to get out of WA.
And because engagement is strong, it means that if monetization is done, it will be easier to return capital.
Facebook is indeed a lot of money capital. It doesn't matter for them to experiment with WhatsApp. They just stretch out the WhatsApp free service for a long time while experimenting about this service's use case.
Until a while ago, Facebook announced the WhatsApp business model would focus on business services. They chose this as a monetization step.
Imagine this: WA branding is very strong, until anything is shared via WA.
If the user just needs WA, then the company will be very happy to communicate to the user via WA. This is where the money warehouse is.
If WA opens its communication path and charges just $ 0.01 for each message, then through tokopedia's shopping notification - with 16 million transactions per month - Facebook can earn $ 160,000 from one company per month. Multiply by millions of businesses who want to use notification services via WA.
Or make a notification like KLM, certainly not cheap.
This is still one channel. Whatsapp can create advertisements for WA stories, track user preferences, and create automatic bot services. Lots of it?
So even though it hasn't gotten profit, it's only for now.
Maybe someday WhatsApp will be able to reach millions of dollars per month from this business.