Meta bought WhatsApp 12 years ago for $19 billion. Then it bled them a billion dollars a year for six years straight, a fact that came out in court last year under oath.
The app was making about 10 cents per user when Meta bought it. We know that figure because it sat inside Meta's own slide deck the week before the deal closed.
WhatsApp's two founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, ran the app on a simple motto: "no ads, no games, no gimmicks." It was printed on the office wall.
They're both gone now. Acton walked out in 2017 and left roughly $850 million in shares on the table, because he didn't want ads inside the app. Koum followed a year later.
The new ads don't appear in your private chats, your group messages, or your calls. Those stay locked the way they always were, and Meta can't read them. The ads are going inside the Updates tab instead, the place with Status and Channels where you see the disappearing photos people post. 1.5 billion people open that tab every day. The new ads sit inside it and look exactly like the ones you scroll past between Instagram Stories.
To pick which ad to show you, Meta uses your country, your city, your language, the channels you follow, and the ads you've clicked on before.
Morgan Stanley thinks Meta brings in $3 to 5 billion a year from this. A Wall Street firm called Evercore puts it at around $10 billion a year by 2028, if Meta earns about $6 from each daily user.
For scale, Meta made $164 billion last year. Almost all of it, $160 billion, came from ads on Facebook and Instagram. WhatsApp's entire revenue was about $1.8 billion. Every dollar of that came from businesses paying to message customers on the app.
So the $19 billion bill from 2014 has been sitting on Meta's books for 12 years. WhatsApp now has 3.3 billion users every month. The Updates tab is how Meta finally starts paying that bill back.
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@_fefas My ever first appearance before a magistrate. With my hands shaking and my voice trembling, I said "good morning your honour" The counsel beside me was close to laughing. The Magistrate, was looking at me, full of pity. It felt like the ground should open and swallow me ๐
A High Court judge of minimum 10 yearโs PQE held that the estate of a deceased person was not liable for unpaid debt. The Court of Appeal upturned it and the lawyers to the estate too now appealed to the Supreme Court. Weโre just so terrible tbh.
I have no doubt in my heart that Justice L.A. Okunnu of the High Court of Lagos State will make it to the Supreme Court of Nigeria.
A proper judge with finesse!