Many people have a curiosity to know how WhatsApp makes money, while it doesn’t charge even a single dollar from it’s users. Before coming on WhatsApp’s probable model of making money, we should understand how the advertising industry works and pays for advertisements. Companies pay the celebrity for advertising their products, a small portion of money is for giving their precious time to the company for shooting the advertisement and a major portion of money is for increasing the viewership due to their popularity (viewership is directly related to the sale of companies’ products).
We know that youtube also gives an opportunity to common people for making a good amount of money through their videos, uploaded on youtube. If someone uploads a video on youtube and allows the advertisements from companies, indexed on google, the companies pay money to the video uploader according to views for their videos (rates are around $2-10 per thousand views), because your video also increases the viewership of the advertisements, linked with uploaded videos.
Now come on WhatsApp how it increases the viewership of advertisements. Let's say, when someone found an interesting video on youtube, linked with advertisements (usually the first advertisement comes before starting the actual video) and shared with friends on WhatsApp. There is a very high chance that they (with whom video is shared) will watch that video at least for a minute or less whether they like it or not, because people get posts on WhatsApp as a personal message. We also know that WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion users with more than 1 billion active users on a daily basis, who share ~65 billion WhatsApp messages and ~200 million videos per day. It means when you share a video on WhatsApp, it will be circulated among a large number of WhatsApp users across the world, which eventually increases the viewership of the advertisements, linked with the videos or pictures.
As I have mentioned above, a celebrity or you-tubers get money mainly for increasing the viewership of advertisements and WhatsApp is also doing the same work of increasing the viewership of advertisements by its own way without sharing/selling user’s data (WhatsApp’s main USP) or without showing advertisements (WhatsApp’s main USP) to its users on the app, so I think WhatsApp should also get a huge amount of money from advertising companies for increasing viewership of their products.
