Oh dear, Zuckerberg wants to make WhatsApp a money maker
After widespread criticism of his focus on its misnamed metaverse, which is rapidly turning into a financial black hole, Mark Zuckerberg has announced he is to focus on to trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of WhatsApp.
How does Zuckerberg intend to make WhatsApp a money machine? The company he acquired in February 2014 for about $23 billion and whose founders left in 2017 and 2018 due to serious disagreements with the evolution of his project (one of them, Brian Acton, used part of his money to fund Signal, a technically superior WhatsApp competitor, with privacy guarantees and dependent on a non-profit foundation), has been experimenting for some time now with different ways of obtaining revenue. In countries like Brazil and India, the company is experimenting with supermarket shopping through its platform, business search functionality, yellow pages, directories and communities, as well as bolstering its corporate side with a new cloud-based API, a paid section for its Business App, and a deal with Salesforce to enable it to integrate corporate CRMs.
All this might sound good… if it weren’t, as always, for who is behind it: the same irresponsible and unaccountable company that has spent a lifetime collecting data en masse from its users to sell it to the highest bidder, as well as exposing children to…
