Facebook has been quite aggressive in maximizing the revenue generating capabilities of its various assets, but one asset has not been contributing immensely although it cost them the most: WhatsApp.
This is about to change drastically with the new monetizing scheme, which WhatsApp has announced today.
The new WhatsApp Business API will allow businesses connect with their customers around the world on WhatsApp. People will be able too connect a business by either asking for helpful information like a boarding pass or shipping confirmation or get real time support and even start a conversation by clicking on a click to chat button on a website or a Facebook ad to message a business.
There is the issue of your WhatsApp getting cluttered and WhatsApp has thought of that. Businesses will pay to send certain messages so they are selective. People also have full control over the messages they receive.
The most interesting part is that WhatsApp will let businesses respond to messages from users for free upto 24 hours, but will charge them a fixed rate by country per message after that deadline. This has the effect where it will implore businesses to respond queries made by customers quickly and in return, customers would know that WhatsApp is the place to be for fast replies to your messages.
“Since we launched the WhatsApp Business app, people have told us that it’s quicker and easier to chat with a business than making a call or sending an email,”WhatsApp said in the post. This is clearly their goal and frankly it is the new world order.
WhatsApp is now poised to bring back its $19 billion investment that Facebook pumped into it when they bought it a few years back. It has over 1.5 billion users and it is a potential cash cow for the company that has a number of platforms with over a billion users each.
i suspected this was on the way. At first, i couldn’t get my head around why a business would acquire a non-profitable asset. Perhaps it wanted to mine our data just like its parent company Facebook is fond of doing.
[…] and businesses could create ads to target them. Facebook already does monetization on the app via customer replies through its new WhatsApp business […]
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