Mark Zuckerberg has become in a few years one of the richest men in the world, thanks to the creation of Facebook and the acquisition of various companies thereafter. However, lately we’ve seen how the company has had to make a drastic shift from social media to the Metaverse, with a name change involved.
The Metaverse is not the future, at least for now
Despite the tens of billions the company formerly known as FACEBOOK has spent creating and promoting the Metaverse, reality is determined to show that, at least for now, people aren’t interested in carrying out all their online activities, or at least not virtually. .
It’s possible that if the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t happened, the reality would be different, but an event of this magnitude changes a lot of things, and our relationship with technology is no exception.
In this way, in Meta, they had to change their strategy in the short and medium term so as not to suffer a debacle. The ship was starting to capsize and its rescuer seems to be within the company itself: WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is still a diamond in the rough
Those of you who have been using smartphones for longer will remember that before WhatsApp and similar apps in Europe, we had to pay for each SMS individually, at a very high cost for what that technically meant for operators.
This has made the adoption of WhatsApp in our market a religion, making it nearly impossible to find someone not using it. The same did not happen in other countries as they had flat rates for SMS so there was no such need.
During these years, WhatsApp was paid, having to pay 89 euro cents per year. Yes, you read that right, it was the annual fee. Well, even so, many refused to pay, as it was a time when paying for apps was considered absurd.
At some point WhatsApp became free and monetization started to be looked at in a different way.
WhatsApp should generate a lot more money than it does now
A service with over 2 billion users should be a particularly profitable business, and WhatsApp is not. It’s not that it’s losing money, but it’s not in the same position as Facebook or Instagram, as Mark Zuckerberg himself has admitted.
Moreover, WhatsApp is a very smooth and integrated day-to-day use application, which means that people would notice its absence if at any point they considered leaving it for any reason. This works in favor of Meta.
[Apps de mensajería interoperativas: la UE quiere que envíes un mensaje desde Telegram y llegue a WhatsApp]
What does not work in its favor is the existence of many alternatives, such as Telegram, which are much more powerful but also much more complex to use, especially for an older public profile. The average age of Telegram users is much lower than WhatsApp.
Will WhatsApp cost money per month?
It is still early to know what strategy Meta will have with WhatsApp in the coming years, but it seems unlikely that we will see a radical shift that would require us to pay to use WhatsApp.
We may see the launch of a premium subscription with advanced features, or an increase in paid features like stickers or new avatars.
As we mentioned, there are alternative options to WhatsApp, and Meta can’t afford a mistake about the size of its commitment to the Metaverse right now.
However, it is likely thatLet’s see many more changes in WhatsApp (and Facebook Messenger) in the coming years than in recent years, as the parent company has placed these two applications at the top of its priority list, in order to squeeze their economic profitability.
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