my thoughts: - legitimate threat to FB/defensive move. Imagine twitter or even yahoo/microsoft/google gaining access to whatsapp userbase. instant mobile social network overnight -> poured into their own social ecosystems. - good "structural" social network. unlike snapchat, it's not a fad or cultural phenomena. it cures a basic need -> SMS without costs - good method to penetrate and saturate worldwide markets (FB's efforts have been meh thus far). whatsapp did a great job of being culturally neutral. FB's american roots show - corollary to above two: users are much stickier/loyal - great synergy with FB. FB has been fail on the mobile front, acquiring 2-3 mobile FB apps and coming out with 2-3 of their own. all have failed. in large part, FB's web platform is much more complex than what is desired for a mobile social platform. - # of eyeballs is off the charts. You can introduce this userbase to your other stuff that does monetize (ads, games, apps, online retail stores) - It's hard to justify almost $20-50 per user evaluation, especially considering user acquisition costs are usually in nickels and dimes for users overseas in many of these countries. even over 10 years? eh - FB doesn't have the resources to handle worldwide monetization and have had fail strategies globally - this is a complicated and large hurdle. so the value of these global users may be premature for FB (source: worked with several of their worldwide teams). - i'm curious what the number of "quality" messages are sent. just like twitter, likely <5% of messages actually catch eyeballs. this figure is vital in determining the advertising value. (helped design a few small scale social platforms)
Sequoia Capital offers some insight in to why Facebook bought WhatsApp. For those that don't know, Sequoia Capital was the only major investor in WhatsApp. Their share of the company is estimated at 10-15% for anywhere from a $10-60 million dollar investment. http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbers-that-explain-why-facebook-acquired I'm not copy/pasting a quote here, as it is a rather long post. Long story short, they have 450 million active users, 72% of all users log in every day (3-4 times industry average), they are still experiencing exponential growth and they run extremely lean even though they are more than double the size of Twitter. They process more than 50 billion messages daily.
