Wednesday, February 19, 2014

What's WhatsApp?

Four Numbers That Explain Why Facebook Acquired WhatsApp
$19B for a company I'd never heard of.  I now officially feel like an out of touch old man.  Get off my lawn!
Via Daring Fireball:
The company only has 32 engineers on staff. So they have roughly 14 million active users per engineer, and the company’s acquisition price works out to $500 million per engineer. That’s simply astounding. The article doesn’t make clear whether WhatsApp was running in the black, or what percent of those 450 million active users have signed up for the $1/year subscription. But it sounds like they’ve built a service that can profitably scale to serve everyone for just $1 per year, with no ads.
Now: how long until Facebook adds the ads, games, and gimmicks?

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