Meta’s Giant Flytrap
Earlier this year, WhatsApp had a mini outage for a few hours. Users scrambled!! A few of them would have even started texting each other on the short messaging service (also known as SMS), a service many would have hardly used since the arrival of WhatsApp and the likes of other messaging apps.
Meta’s grip on social media in the east is one of a stranglehold.
In India, if you consider its widespread use across tier-1 and tier-2 cities as well, one would be tempted to call it a choke-hold. WhatsApp groups permeate the cybersphere where folks from all walks of life — starting from school kids all the way up to nanny’s have their own WhatsApp groups.
This growth occurred despite the negativity of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco a few years ago or even Meta’s face-off against the Australian Government’s ruling in favor of its local media houses free-for-all content available on Facebook.
The short form video space too was also handed to Meta on a silver platter after India banned Tik Tok due to skirmishes at the India-China border some 5 years ago. All said and done, the Meta juggernaut is still in the race in the Asia Pacific region despite the threat of Tik Tok.
Despite these advantages, sitting on a sizeable user base is somewhat akin to the tale of the famous “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” from A Thousand and One Knights where there was a cave full of Gold lying there waiting to be stolen, if one could only utter the golden words — “Open Sesame”!!
Revenue from advertising still accounts for a large portion of Meta’s profits. This is precisely why, when Apple built its walled garden around the iOS 14.5 two years ago, Meta’s stock price went into free fall.
Since then, Meta has been making headway in the realm of social commerce. I began to notice this a few years ago, when WhatsApp Business began to gain traction. Shortly afterwards, I kept getting spammed by businesses on WhatAapp such as Vistara Air, The India Today Group, Amazon India, ICICI Bank and almost every other business I had interacted with from either my mobile or laptop.
Mark Zuckerberg had a much grander plan to diversify Meta’s revenue stream away from Advertising alone. This is where Social Commerce — specifically in India, along with its 450 Million active monthly users, was the obvious route forward.
Key to this strategic direction was their tie-up with JioMart in 2022. This integration enabled users to browse JioMart’s shopping catalog from WhatsApp. Needless to say, a conversational bott on WhatsApp now can handle your entire order on JioMart without you even switching sites. (a dream for most social commerce platforms). I may not know many people who use this feature but the latest data shows that this format of buying has seen an up-tick.
Not far behind is the Open Network for Digital Commerce(ONDC), that is too often eclipsed by both Amazon and FlipCart. This government-launched Digital platform was meant to deliver social justice to sellers who felt thy were being overcharged on Amazon and their likes. ONDC Sahayak, too, is a whatsapp chatbot that can now be used by vendors to navigate the platform with the bonus of multi-lingual capability.
The ability for WhatApp to act as a conduit to different and possibly even larger Super-Apps such as in these 2 cases above is even more pronounced. Just like a fly trap that has a kitty full of insects, it will now digest them into the ecosystem.
The race for the Super-Apps is now in full swing.
