Though what the company can and cannot see is hotly debated. Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can read your messages, the company says, and information entered into WhatsApp will not be shared onto any other platform owned by Facebook. It was always assumed that Facebook invested for the amount of user data it could capture, though with the end-to-end encryption of messages, this became more complicated. The absence of ads on WhatsApp is due to the fact that Acton and Koum, the app’s founders, left Yahoo! due to work relating to selling ads. It cost users $1/£1 per year, or it was free for the first year and then it cost $1/£1 each subsequent year. In the early days of the app’s existence – if you can remember back to that stone age – WhatsApp was a pay-for app.
Since they are only generating 5 billion from ads and business-level upgrades, this could lead to running the service at a loss. If the average user has the potential to bring in 4 annually (see below explanation of Previous Model), this leads to a revenue potential of 8 billion. He said that respect for the WhatsApp users privacy was in their DNA. WhatsApp currently has an estimated 2 billion users.
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, who is originally from Ukraine, wrote in a blog about WhatsApp and Facebook’s partnership about his childhood growing up in the USSR in the 80s when they were not able to speak freely on the telephone as their communications were monitored by the KGB. The acquisition raised some eyebrows at the fact that Facebook now had access to data that was contained in private messages.
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