The Facebook-owned popular messaging platform WhatsApp has announced that now it will start charging business users for sending messages to their clients. The announcement comes on the heels of the Q2 revenue and growth update from WhatsApp which showed a stalling trajectory of growth and revenue in the past few months.
WhatsApp has always been ad-free and very simple which is why it became a popular choice for messaging in emerging economies where data is a bit expensive and smartphones have less storage space. Since the application is free and doesn’t have ads, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the company to work on revenue streams.
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One of the upcoming experiments from Facebook to turn towards revenue is charging brands for sending marketing and customer service message. WhatsApp will be charging 7 PKR to 16 PKR for a single message. Quite frankly, this is a premium amount as the traditional SMS services charge much less than 1 PKR for a single message. One of the major reason for this high price is the expenditures by WhatsApp on privacy and security of its users. WhatsApp is the only Facebook-owned platform that doesn’t share users’ data between the applications and doesn’t allow ad targetting as well.
Despite this, in emerging economies like Pakistan and India, WhatsApp will have a hard time convincing brands to pay 700% to 1000% premium as compared to normal messaging rates. Probably, WhatsApp will have to revisit their pricing strategy. This paywall is expected to go live in January.
It must be noted here that the original founders of WhatsApp were against the idea of monetizing the application through ads, sharing users information to third parties or introducing a paywall, it is reportedly due to the conflict of the vision, both of the founders have left WhatsApp and the product is solely managed by Facebook.
WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion users and is one of the top application for communication in Asia. During the last revenue call, WhatsApp also announced its WhatsApp Business API to allow businesses to share package shipping options, appointments and event tickets.
