Whats App wants to make its own encryption for the messages, is it for this new encryption that WhatsApp wants to monetize the application ?
Today at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, the CEO of Facebook-owned WhatsApp made a couple of big announcements about how the messaging app plans to evolve to its next phase as it approaches 1 billion users: the company plans to drop its $0.99 annual subscription fee, and it will start to test out more commercial services — specifically a B2C business for companies to communicate with their customers.
The subscription fee — which used to kick in after a year of free use — may be getting scrapped in favor of alternative revenues. But this won’t include ads, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said.
“We’re going to get rid of the $1 subscription,” Koum said, later admitting that the backup business model — courting corporates to build B2C services — is still pretty nascent. “We haven’t written a single line of code,
[but we want to] make sure people understand this is not about ads in the product,” he said.If you recall, when Facebook announced it would acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion almost two years ago, both companies were unequivocal about putting ads into WhatsApp and to sharing user data with commercial entities. WhatsApp last updatedits user numbers at 500,000 this past summer although this profile in Wired notes that today the actual number is around 990 million.
Source : TECHCRUNCH.COM