WhatsApp ditiching yearly subscription fee in the coming weeks
19 Jan 2016
WhatsApp is ditching its $1 yearly subscription fee founder Jan Koum, announced at Digital Life Design (DLD) in Munich, Germany.
WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for around $22 billion two years back, and passed the 900 million monthly active user (MAU) mark in September.
While there were concerns over Facebook seeking to monetise WhatsApp, through advertising or other means, there was no clear sign of where Facebook was taking the messaging app in terms of monetisation.
WhatsApp had continued with the same business model with which it started, free for the first year, then a dollar per year thereafter.
However, according to Koum, this business model ''really doesn't work for some people,'' as some people did not have credit cards, for instance.
According to Koum, though, the company would experiment with the monetisation opportunities to be found connecting companies with their customers.
While he admitted WhatsApp had not really settled on the final plan yet, and was yet to write a single line of code for the new project, it seemed that the company was interested in helping big businesses use WhatsApp to conduct customer service and also transactions - with consumers. In other words, WhatsApp would be launching accounts specifically for businesses.
Further, the communications service expected in the coming months to offer complete encryption of messages, a move that would ensure the privacy of user conversations, which was likely to draw further criticism from some governments.
According to authorities in the US, Britain and elsewhere, the increasing prevalence of encryption on services such as WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage, hurt their ability to monitor criminal suspects or thwart militant plots and had threatened to pass new laws to block these changes.
WhatsApp had been been slowly working to develop end-to-end encrypted communications services for over a year and had already introduced full encryption for users on Android phones.
"We are a couple of months away from calling it done," Koum said, noting that once completed, WhatsApp will represent the world's largest service offering completely private messaging. "Soon we will be able to talk more about this," he said, Reuters reported.
