WhatsApp ad-free for another year

No ads. No games. No tricks. WhatsApp, which has just reached 430 million active users, remains firm in its original strategy: an instant messaging application without advertising and free to download, whose only monetization method lies in an annual subscription of 0.89 euros. This was emphasized by its CEO, Jan Koum, at a conference in the German city of Munich, which TechCrunch echoes and in which he indirectly referred to the difference of other competing apps such as the Japanese Line, which includes games and will pay users in some countries with credits for watching video advertising, or the American Snapchat, based on sending photos and videos that are deleted once they have been opened. WhatsApp must, from Koum’s perspective, concentrate on messaging, which has always been its focus, since those who want to play or share ephemeral photos already have specialized services for that. None of those strategies are on the mind of the WhatsApp team, whose goal, Koum pointed out, is to “maintain the spirit of its early days” and to “not sell out,” the same, the businessman stated, that has made companies such as Google and Facebook great, the latter, interested, by the way, in the acquisition of Snapchat. Thus, WhatsApp will maintain the amount and model of its annual subscription and will also avoid, for now, the insertion of ads on its platform, something that its CEO has already described on more than one occasion as invasive for its users. “The important thing now is not to monetize, but to make sure our service works well,” he stressed. Koum, who was born in Soviet Ukraine, recalled that he spent his childhood in a country where advertising did not exist, which made it an “ideal environment,” despite other shortcomings such as the absence of privacy. Regarding this last point, one of the accusations usually made against WhatsApp – considered, by some experts, as a system not very suitable for communications requiring security- Koum has again insisted that his company only has the phone numbers of its users and does not store any other data. WhatsApp, which announced that it had already reached 400 million active users last December, has added another 30 million more in the last two months, due, probably, to the rapid penetration of mobile devices as a means of communication in emerging economies. Koum, who emigrated to the United States at an early age, noted during his speech that he would have liked to have had a service like WhatsApp back then to communicate with the family members who remained in Ukraine.