Whatsapp is one platform that in the recent years has become an essential part of our phones and inevitably our lives. It started with the younger generations using the app but now you can people of all ages and sections of the society using it. Even the telecom companies have realised its importance and have started offering internet plans that support just WhatsApp and nothing else. In this age of technology, Whatsapp is one service that has become indispensable.
On Monday, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum announced that the company is dropping the service's annual subscription fee in an effort to remove the barriers some users faced in using the service.
Whatsapp, when it started it had an annual subscription plan. It was free for one year and then there was a fixed charge in every year if the user wanted to continue. This worked pretty well for some time, but now Whatsapp has become lax in their collecting their fee for the subscription renewal. It has been observed that the users aren't being charged for even after continuous use of more than a year. When asked about the same they said that showed concern for their users and didn't want them to fear losing access and connectivity to their friends and family for so long. Also, a lot of people use Whatsapp for their professional lives as well, mostly for coordinating and communicating. This is more important to them than revenue generation at the moment.
The next question that arises is that if they are lax on subscription then what is their source of revenue. The most common source of income for most networking apps is the advertisement industry. For Whatsapp, that is a big no! Quoting them "Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought." This has been their stand from 2012 itself. Advertisements are not just offsetting to the users but it a form of data mining which is something Whatsapp does not want to indulge into.
They are diverting their attention to businesses which are very actively using the service to reach out to and hear from customers. They will start working in this area now and make this their major source of revenue.
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