So Facebook bought WhatsApp today. $19 billion. I had to read the number twice — four billion in cash, twelve billion in Facebook stock, and another three billion in restricted stock for Jan Koum and Brian Acton that vests over four years. Nineteen. Billion. Dollars. For an app that doesn't even let you set a profile picture without digging through a menu you'll forget about in a week.
I'm not being snarky for the sake of it. I actually use this thing every single day. My cousin's in London, my aunt's in Chennai, and for the last two years WhatsApp has been the only reason I'm not paying my carrier 20 cents a text to talk to either of them. Before that it was Skype chat, which nobody actually opened, or just... not talking as much. So when I saw the headline this morning I had two reactions at almost the same time: "good for those guys" and "oh no."
Koum and Acton built something almost stubbornly simple. No ads. No games. No "sponsored stickers." You pay a dollar a year after your first free year and that's it, that's the whole business model, which in 2014 is basically an act of defiance. Every other app on my phone is trying to sell me something or sell me to someone else. WhatsApp just sends the message. Zuckerberg's post about the deal even says he wants to keep it that way, keep it independent, let Koum join the Facebook board. I want to believe him. I also remember when Instagram got bought for a "mere" billion dollars back in 2012 and everyone said the same thing, and Instagram's fine, I guess, but it's not the same app it was.
The user numbers are the part that actually explains the price, if anything does. WhatsApp's been saying something like 450 million people use it every month, and they're adding close to a million new users a day. A message service that size, that sticky, that international — it's not really a chat app anymore, it's basically the phone network for a huge chunk of the planet, minus the phone company. That's worth something to Facebook in a way that's separate from whether WhatsApp ever runs a single ad. It's the data, it's the users, it's making sure nobody else owns that layer.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's a small one: I hate that "how much did it sell for" is the only question anyone's asking today. Every tech site I checked at lunch had the same headline with the same dollar figure swapped into it. Nobody's really asking what happens to the app in eighteen months. I've watched enough of these to have a guess: nothing changes for a year, everyone says "see, told you it'd be fine," and then slowly, quietly, something changes. A little icon here. A "connect your Facebook friends" prompt there. I hope I'm wrong. I'd genuinely like to be wrong about this one, because it's one of maybe three apps on my phone I don't resent opening.
Small aside, only sort of related: I've had the Sochi Olympics on in the other room half the day while writing this, and the tape-delay coverage combined with everyone live-tweeting results before NBC shows them is its own little disaster that nobody seems to be fixing. Different post, maybe.
Anyway. Nineteen billion dollars for the app my mom uses to send me blurry photos of her garden. Koum used to be in line for food stamps a few miles from where Facebook's headquarters sits now, or so the story going around today says, I can't verify that one yet, but if it's true it's a hell of a detail, and it's the only part of this whole announcement that made me feel something other than mild dread about my messaging app's future.
We'll see. I'm not deleting it. I'm just going to be watching the settings menu a little more closely than usual for a while.