'I Sold My Users' Privacy To a Larger Benefit. I Made a Choice and a Compromise. And I Live With That Every Day': WhatsApp Cofounder On Leaving Facebook (forbes.com) 163
Brian Acton, a founder of WhatsApp, which he (along with the other founder) sold to Facebook for $19 billion four years ago, has grown tired of the social juggernaut. He left the company a year ago, and earlier this year, he surprised many when he tweeted "#DeleteFacebook", offering his support to what many described as a movement. He had started despising working at Facebook so much, that he left the company abruptly, leaving a cool $850M in unvested stock. He has also invested $50 million in encrypted chat app Signal. In an interview with Forbes, published Wednesday, Acton talked about his rationale behind leaving the company and what he thinks of Facebook now. From the story: Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. "It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don't want to do," Acton says. "It's better if I get out of your way. And I did." It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door -- the decision cost him $850 million.
He's following a similar moral code now. He clearly doesn't relish the spotlight this story will bring and is quick to underscore that Facebook "isn't the bad guy." ("I think of them as just very good businesspeople.") But he paid dearly for the right to speak his mind. "As part of a proposed settlement at the end, [Facebook management] tried to put a nondisclosure agreement in place," Acton says. "That was part of the reason that I got sort of cold feet in terms of trying to settle with these guys."
It's also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? "At the end of the day, I sold my company," Acton says. "I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."
Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp's new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. "Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy," he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been "No ads, no games, no gimmicks" -- a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been "Take the time to get it right," a stark contrast to "Move fast and break things." Elsewhere in the story, Acton has also suggested he was used by Facebook to help get its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp past EU regulators that had been concerned it might be able to link accounts -- as it subsequently did.
Update: Facebook Executive Hits Back at WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton: 'A Whole New Standard of Low-Class'.
He's following a similar moral code now. He clearly doesn't relish the spotlight this story will bring and is quick to underscore that Facebook "isn't the bad guy." ("I think of them as just very good businesspeople.") But he paid dearly for the right to speak his mind. "As part of a proposed settlement at the end, [Facebook management] tried to put a nondisclosure agreement in place," Acton says. "That was part of the reason that I got sort of cold feet in terms of trying to settle with these guys."
It's also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? "At the end of the day, I sold my company," Acton says. "I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."
Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp's new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. "Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy," he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been "No ads, no games, no gimmicks" -- a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been "Take the time to get it right," a stark contrast to "Move fast and break things." Elsewhere in the story, Acton has also suggested he was used by Facebook to help get its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp past EU regulators that had been concerned it might be able to link accounts -- as it subsequently did.
Update: Facebook Executive Hits Back at WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton: 'A Whole New Standard of Low-Class'.
Poor guy (Score:5, Informative)
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If he felt actual remorse.. he'd give away all 19B of the "devil's money"
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Re:Poor guy (Score:4, Informative)
Investing $50 million, which is something like .02% of his wealth into Signal
His net worth is about $3.6B (the $19B was split many ways), so $50M is about 1.4%. But still, it is absurd how he is trying to portray himself as some sort of morally superior victim.
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This is his "I'm sorry, I won't do it again..." in order to gain back some trust so he build another large following and promptly sell their privacy away for a paycheck.
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Of course he is. The keywords from the summary for me were "He has also invested $50 million in encrypted chat app Signal".
He needs to trash WhatsApp in order to get users to switch. He's hoping that lightening strikes twice and that he has another multi billion dollar company on his hands. It probably will not happen, but he's doing what he needs to do to help make it happen.
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Let's all be perfectly honest here. For ONE billion dollars (much less 19) we'd all sell out pretty much anything or anyone.
It's the same reasons executives will cut staff even if a company isn't in dire straights...because it boosts their P/L and stock price which drives multi-million dollar bonuses for them. Hell, people will sell our their OWN privacy for a free trinket or movie ticket.
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> For ONE billion dollars (much less 19) we'd all sell out pretty much anything or anyone.
First: You can't buy good morals, but you can sell bad ones.
Second: Uhm, no. Not everyone has an over-inflated sense of money as you.
Third: You DO realize that success means not just financial success, right?
Re:Poor guy (Score:5, Interesting)
He sold his soul and his users, he isn't denying it, at some point his conscience got the better of him and he walked away. Hopefully he did so as a better version of himself than the one who started down that road. That is all life and growth is, sometimes the wrong path is about billions, sometimes it is dimes at a lemonade stand.
Do you know how many times I've stood at the threshold of a slight compromise to my integrity that would bring me wealth and walked away... just to watch someone else take the opportunity I left open and do the damage anyway? It isn't easy. It also isn't easy to avoid judging those who went over the cliff from the moral high ground despite knowing how easily you could have tripped yourself. Sometimes the greatest merit is found in what you choose not to do and sadly wealth does not so readily follow that kind of merit. After all, how would you distinguish it from those who use integrity to mask the fact they are afraid to dive off the cliff?
Re: Poor guy (Score:2, Insightful)
History classes shit on the puritans but holy shit if weâ(TM)re not as judgmental as they are and way more unforgiving.
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Besides, didn't Facebook make a pledge to keep the Whatsapp data separate? He might have known that was an iffy promise from the start, but this broken promise is not on him, it's on FB. And it's something the EU have given them shit for.
Right. And why the hell can't Facebook sell non-targeted ads on WhatsApp? If the users are there, advertisers will follow. They may not be able to charge quite as much, but they can still charge for anonymous eyeballs. Or they could make a deal with their users along the lines of "you agree to tell me some basic statistics (gender, age, location) and let me use that to target ads, and I promise I will not user (or even store) your data". There's a business model in there that, while not as lucrative as
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However much he'd already taken home, this man paid $850 million USD to let us know they were lying about having done so in the first place and to highlight for those boycotting Facebook that Facebook owned alternatives are still Facebook. Regardless of whether you judge him or what your verdict might be we should still take the mes
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Right. And why the hell can't Facebook sell non-targeted ads on WhatsApp? If the users are there, advertisers will follow.
(1) Non-targeted ads compete with every other advertising medium -- targeting is attractive to advertisers and they are willing to pay a premium
(2) Non-targeted ads annoy you users approximately as much as targeted ads. Some users like targeted ads. Some find them creepy.
In a nutshell, all ads have a negative cost in terms of user experience, so you might as well milk it for all the revenue possible,
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I get that targeted ads are more valuable. But in order to sell targeted ads, you need to have the targets. So, just saying, if a Facebook or WhatsApp competitor decided to go into the business of running a similar site that's ad-funded, but does not use user data to target ads, and if (big if?) enough people switched to that competitor to avoid being spied on, then advertisers would have to advertise there too. And maybe the ads there would be cheaper, and the owners of the site would be less fabulously
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Right. And why the hell can't Facebook sell non-targeted ads on WhatsApp?
Because that's much less lucrative. That's why this guy made $19B. To be able to target ads at these users.
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Nah, the billionaires club is a whole different world. 50 million is spendable money. 19 billion is where you can invest in larger things you believe in. Hell, it'd buy a pretty good privacy campaign against FB now that we're on the topic.
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Good for him - both the selling out and the walking out.
Selling out is fine. Walking out is fine. Turning around and trashing the buyer, not fine. He's the reason his users' privacy is now in jeopardy with Facebook. He sold his users for $19B. Nobody think yet another chat app was worth $19B. He sold the users.
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"He's the reason his users' privacy is now in jeopardy with Facebook."
So your contention is that selling out your users and putting their privacy in Jeopardy is fine but trying to mitigate the damage by making sure they are aware of it when Facebook pretends they've left their acquisitions running untouched and without interference is not fine? Wrong isn't some pie to be divided up where his amount of wrong somehow l
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but trying to mitigate the damage by making sure they are aware of it when Facebook pretends they've left their acquisitions running untouched and without interference is not fine?
If he's doing something less than giving all of the money he took to sell out his users to Facebook to fight this, then yeah it's not fine.
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At the same time, it's easier to compromise your morals when when you're starving, like when people have to turn to crime to pay the bills. Kinda hard to feel sorry for someone who made literally thousands of times as much money as he needed to sustain himself, and still kept going for years anyway. At that point, the only reason you develop "morals" is because you've gotten bored or weary of your day job and the money doesn't seem worth it anymore.
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It makes no difference, the last thing one should do is support the idea that once you've done something wrong or harmful you might as well keep at it and even magnify it because you will forever be damned and vilified. You don't have to ignore his actions and trust him with your privacy but holding animosity toward him hurts you and our
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If we don't support the act of walking away from a path that hurts millions or even billions of people then we hedge in those who continue to walk that path and make it harder for them to walk away, at the same time we make it easier for those who continue on that path to justify it to themselves.
I support him donating his Facebook $$$ to to charity to fight for this cause. I don't support him badmouthing the hand that fed him under false pretenses because he's got some other startup going that wants to eat part of Facebook's lunch.
Let's not get confused. Whatsapp users had their privacy violated because of Brian Acton. He sold them to Facebook. He knew Facebook's business. I'm happy to hear him say he's sorry for what he did and compensate the people who were hurt by his actions. But this #deletefa
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What false pretenses? You tend to imply there is nothing false about it with your subsequent statement:
"He sold them to Facebook. He knew Facebook's business."
Facebook is currently pretending it has up till now been allowing the platforms it has purchased to continue running as they did before purchase as a way of hedging its bets. This creates the false impression that privacy concerns about Facebook don't apply to the other platf
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Facebook isn't the hand that fed him, he built Whatsapp and Facebook wanted it, that isn't a charity effort. He doesn't owe them anything. You don't have some kind of obligation to someone because they've served their own interests and bought something from you.
Sometimes that cliff is a slope, a slippery one (Score:3)
You mentioned going over a moral cliff. In my own experience, I tend to slide down a slope more often than I jump off a cliff.
Years ago, I was a serving as a middle-man of sorts collecting money daily on behalf of someone, and about once per month I'd send it to him. Sometimes it was two months in between - he wasn't worried about exactly how often it was sent. He wasn't at all tight on cash, so he didn't care if it was four weeks between payments or six weeks. One day I had to pay my payroll two days befor
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I think most would agree that any path resulti
It's only a fallacy if there is no slope (Score:2)
The slippery slope fallacy is assuming a slippery slope *when there isn't one*.
In my experience, once I "borrow" a dollar without permission, it becomes easier to later "borrow" $5, then later $20. For me at least, there is a bit of a binary choice between "I'm not a thief, period" and "well sometimes I kinda ...". So there actually IS a slippery slope. It's not a fallacy to recognize a slippery slope that is actually there.
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True, but few slippery slopes are actually there. A slippery slope would require a chain reaction of events wherein one necessarily follows another, your example confuses one action reducing inertia to the next with making the next action certain. If there were a slippery slope as you suggest an individual would only have accountability for their first theft because the slippery slope they were on made subsequent theft inevitable. The
Definition. Slippery slope vs black hole (Score:2)
You seem to be using a different definition than I am for "slippery slope".
The Oxford Dictionary defines "slippery" as "difficult to hold on to" (not impossible), and "slippery slope" as "one action likely to lead to another" (not guaranteed).
https://en.oxforddictionaries.... [oxforddictionaries.com]
It would be error to assume that something WILL happen because it is MORE LIKELY to happen.
It would also be error to ignore something that increases the probability of a bad outcome, only because it doesn't GUARANTEE a bad outcome.
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No, the right thing to do would have been to simply ask and accept whatever financial penalty he might ask and the risk he might decide you are a risky investment since you were unable to plan your finances in a way that avoided a shortfall. In his position I'd have said yes on a first pass because even the best planner can make a mistake, one you could now learn from, you'd have shown integrity in asking, and unless I am going to pull my business from you a shortfall
Re:Sometimes that cliff is a slope, a slippery one (Score:4, Insightful)
One day I had to pay my payroll two days before my own funds became available. So in order to pay my employees on time, I borrowed from the "middle man" money for 48 hours.
I'm not making a judgment either way, but in fairness to you, that situation represents two conflicting moral quandaries. On the one hand, you shouldn't borrow money without permission, but on the other, you shouldn't make a worker wait for his pay when they've already given you their labor.
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So, he sold out to Facebook
He can't just say "boo hoo I was wrong" and expect people to believe him or care."
I haven't heard him asking for forgiveness or suggested it should be given. If you hold animosity toward him it is you w
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'It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door -- the decision cost him $850 million.'
Taking a screenshot to remember (and possibly share later, which he did) how you were "moral" sure sounds like a pity party, if not outright trying to make himself someho
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A fact that as he puts it, he has to live with each and every day. Though I can't think of a worse path going forward than giving $19 billion back to the "biggest scumbag companies in existence." I'm sure FB would be thrilled if he did.
Th
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Yeah exactly.
It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history
The most expensive moral stands are people sacrificing all their wealth, and even their lives, to a moral position. There's a lot of examples of that in history
Mr. Acton's net worth is (currently) 3.6G$, so unless his worth changed a lot since last year, his 850M$ were not even 20% of his worth. And even if he would donate/sacrifice 90% of his wealth, that would be less impressive than someone at the median or poverty line doing the same, since 10% of 3.6G$ is still more than enough money to ne
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I have no money and no talent to monetize.
He cries himself to sleep (Score:1)
on his giant pile of money
Like Youth is wasted on the Young... (Score:2)
Money is wasted on the Successful workaholics.
Seriously, give me a few million in the bank to return about $100K of income and I'm retired and traveling.
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That's more than enough if you want to travel (per person), as opposed to stay in luxury hotels/go to Michelin star restaurants. And I'm talking about travel to major Western cities, not just the Asian countryside.
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And you'd retire and do...nothing.
As opposed to someone who created whatsapp...giving him the power/ability/money to do the Next Big Thing when he's already shown to be capable. Elon Musk for example...love em or hate em he took his money and built a successful fscking rocket company and a (more or less) successful car company.
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As opposed to someone who created whatsapp...giving him the power/ability/money to do the Next Big Thing when he's already shown to be capable.
Yes, where world the world have been without yet another chat app?
Hero.
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Did you give your $8.5B to those you exploited? (Score:1)
Do you feel THAT bad about it?
Oh. Sorry. Carry on with your sudden burst of moral preening from the comfort of your ivory tower.
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It is not illegal to collect and sell your personal metadata. Only PHI under HIPAA is somewhat protected, but this is limited to medical field.
Every once in a while (Score:4)
Re:Every once in a while (Score:5, Insightful)
He gave up an extra $850M after the many billions vested because what's the point of being a billionaire if you have to get up every morning to go to a job that you hate?
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How is "I'm quitting" a principled stand? If he stood up and said "No" til he got fired, I would be very impressed. But he didn't. He just said "you guys do whatever, I'm out."
It's very similar to people calling on members of [insert political administration] to resign. I don't see how that helps anyone.
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What were his plans to monetize WhatsApp? (Score:4, Insightful)
So how was he planning to make money from WhatsApp?
Re:What were his plans to monetize WhatsApp? (Score:5, Funny)
Sell it to Facebook.
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Charging for the software. They charged a small fee after the first year.
Re:What were his plans to monetize WhatsApp? (Score:4, Insightful)
IIRC they were still burning through money like it was going out of fashion.
Without Facebook (or someone else's) intervention, they were on a sure path to going bust.
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They said they would, but IIRC, they never actually cut people off who didn't pay.
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The plan was to charge 1$ every year per user. Whatsapp accumulated some 1.5+ million active users, it would've been a very respectable income. But that's not Facebook's business plan... paying users are customers with their own rights - you can't exploit them like non-paying users.
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$1 per user/year and 1.5m users - wouldn't even pay for 10 active developers.
Re:What were his plans to monetize WhatsApp? (Score:5, Insightful)
$1 per user/year and 1.5m users - wouldn't even pay for 10 active developers.
You barely NEED 10 active developers for something like Whatsapp and Twitter. The fact that they have hundreds (thousands in the case of the latter) only shows how ridiculous companies become when they start swimming in money.
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Really? Cause what happens when it fails on some specific device? Or when you need to upgrade to the latest Android version so that Google won't demote you in the search results. Or when a flaw in the encryption library requires a rebuild right the fuck now
And that's not even accounting for server maintenance (in the pre-AWS/Cloud world) .
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I have to say, your post is an impressive fail.
First off, $1.5mm won't pay for squat at the corporate level.
Second, when they sold, they had about 315 million daily active users, not 1.5
Third, assuming that plan is all fine and good you'd ALSO lose 30% of that revenue to the app store overhead PLUS the cost of supporting issues/billing/complaints etc.
Would $200 million a year be sufficient? Maybe so ... assuming everyone paid which is absolutely not what would have happened.
Sold out and now feels bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
... but not bad enough to do anything that's not symbolic. Like most CEOs, the guy has no moral compass.
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... but not bad enough to do anything that's not symbolic
What exactly do you call ditching $850M and investing heavily in a morally sound competitor (Signal)? Tell me, frank, what would it take for you to feel like this guy is doing something more than purely symbolic gestures? And more importantly, hold that measure to yourself. In his situation, what is the action that your moral high-ground would take that he is not measuring up to?
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He has a hint of moral compass but not enough to act meaningfully on it (like, say, preventing a Facebook buyout in the first place). He didn't give up, or invest in Signal, any more than a small fraction of the money he's earned, and certainly not enough to blemish a multibillionaire's lifestyle if he should wish to have one. Also:
He clearly doesn't relish the spotlight this story will bring and is quick to underscore that Facebook "isn't the bad guy." ("I think of them as just very good businesspeople.")
There is zero conflict between being a bad guy and a good businessperson. Most bad guys are good businesspeople.
This is typical chickenshit 0.1%er morals and activism that amount
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It wouldn't be. Signal is merely a stopgap. It's much better than Whatsapp, but it's still a central - and thus vulnerable - solution. What we need is a distributed solution. A set of protocols and a shitload of implementations. That's how the Internet was meant to be and there's no reason whatsoever this approach cannot work for "social" stuff. I hope the guy dumps a few billion into that and takes down Facebook, Twitter, Signal, Telegram, Instagram, Soundcloud and all other centralized crap along the way.
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You're right that the centralization of Signal is technically not ideal, but unfortunately it's necessary for a popular solution. Better distributed chat solutions existed before and after Whatsapp, for free back when Whatsapp cost money, but never caught on because of the convenience advantages possible with centralization. The phone-number linked lookup system makes adding new contacts and controlling spam and harassment a breeze. The centralized servers minimize connectivity difficulties on the user end.
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I don't think it's necessary for a popular solution. It's just easier to get there because you don't need to talk to other people about APIs, you don't need to write an RFC and you don't get a barrier for your users to go elsewhere.
But it's not necessary. Just look at the success of http, smtp, dns etc.
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Those are all protocols that had a chance to establish themselves before Eternal September, and you'll note that although those are open protocols, they all rely on very much centralized systems in practice, especially DNS. If new basic Internet protocols were established today, they would look a lot more like Facebook, AMP and Whatsapp itself. If we can use open protocols and open-source client apps and settle for just enough centralization to keep the average Joes on board so that we nerds don't self-segr
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You mean Tox? https://tox.chat/ [tox.chat]
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Not quite sure he has a few billion on hand.
But yeah, he's clearly human. He made mistakes. He realized things went too far south. He decided to owe up and bail out instead of let the investment incentives keep him going. It was a personal choice. Personal morals. He clearly doesn't feel a responsibility toward the world, but feels he crossed a personal line that he cannot justify going beyond.
I agree that the people who end up messing stuff up for the rest of us should feel a sense of duty to fix thi
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He decided to owe up and bail out instead of let the investment incentives keep him going.
I would have rather seen him stay for less than 24 hours after his remaining 850m vested, then turn around and dump that whole pot into something philanthropic.
Re:Sold out and now feels bad... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not asking him to burn his life to the ground, not by a long shot. He could do what I asked and continue to be a billionaire, far beyond a millionaire. It would hurt him exactly none in practice, and far less than an unexpected car repair bill hurts any average person in relative finances.
Do you actually think you can just spend a wack of cash and dismantle a social network (does anyone think this?)? Has that EVER worked before?
It could be done. Signal is technically better than Whatsapp, it's not missing anything Whatsapp has except users, driven by network effects. With a big marketing push pointing out the privacy advantages and maybe getting celebrity endorsements, timed to go along with an unpopular change to Whatsapp (of which there are many coming), maybe with some raffle prizes for new users added in, the masses could be pushed onto Signal and eventually, as a result, off of Whatsapp, not literally overnight but over the course of a few weeks.
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Do you actually think you can just spend a wack of cash and dismantle a social network (does anyone think this?)? Has that EVER worked before?
Ever heard of MySpace?
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Selling one's soul follows the rule of stockmarket (Score:2)
Well duh. (Score:3)
What did he think was going to happen? Of course Facebook was going to do these things. What planet is he from? Victim Centari?
Apologize later (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, there's one other lesson here. This is one of the most "normal" human reactions he could have taken. This is just a normal guy, with the usual human flaws, who happens to be sitting on 19 billion dollars.
Most of these high flyers and successful tech people bill themselves as geniuses. Not the case. They took business risks and got lucky to be in the right place and the right time. At the end of the day, these are normals who gambled and won. It wasn't destiny and it wasn't because of their special visionary genius. For every one of them, there are about 100,000 similarly smart, energetic businesspeople who took a similar visionary gamble and lost.
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At this point, user data is valuable and ads are valuable.
Ads are perceived as valuable, but I think that is slowly becoming less the case. Ads of today don't function in the same way they use to. The ads that mostly do work are ads for things like Coke vs Pepsi, laundry detergent, or other things you get at the supermarket; there the ads serve to "prime" you to buy a particular brand. A lot of the ads I have seen (which is few thanks to uBlock) have been to "Come to my website and buy this thing!" and I don't think those are nearly as effective.
The Social Media cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
When those I knew were hot about it around 2009, I decided not to join because of its "keeping up with Joneses" and fake "happy sunshine" vibe. I could see how people were creating this unreal facade of themselves and it really irritated me.
From 2009 to around 2014 People were astonished I didn't have an account.
Another reason I didn't have one was because I saw how much strife was there. I would hear stories from friends/relatives about the arguments and drama, whether political or personal. I would look around on peoples accounts and I saw how the nutty political side was coming out.
Again, people couldn't understand why I didn't have an account on FB.
Then I started noticing that many organizations of all stripes were migrating away from email logins to FB logins, which to me was reprehensible. FB was taking over the online sphere of influence and that irritated me greatly.
Again, people couldn't understand why I didn't have an account on FB.
Then I heard about all the privacy implications, and the underhanded shit FB was doing with user data. The shadow accounts, etc. Yes, I'm sure FB has a nice, juicy dossier on me as well.
Again, people couldn't understand why I didn't have an account on FB.
Then I started hearing from Gen Z that FB was for older peeps, and that they were using other platforms. I also heard they didn't like the underhanded shit FB was doing, which surprised me.
Still, people couldn't understand why I didn't have an account on FB.
Then during and after the election of Trump the shit hit the fan with how slimy FB really was.
So by 2017, people were no longer surprised that I didn't have an account.
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So it only took the plebeians 8 years to catch up to your genius? Slacker.
LMAO, typical of the rich liberals (Score:3, Interesting)
As opposed to? (Score:3)
Another rich smug liberal who now thinks he has a moral compass.
As opposed to the rich smug conservatives who don't have one?
I don't know anything about this guy, or really any billionaire. I would imagine that much money would change a lot of what you do, and might even change who you are as a person. Maybe it depends on if you made it yourself over a long period of time, a relatively short period, if you inherited it, or have a trust fund you were born into. But I think there are billionaires of all types, and their opinion of things is really no different to me th
Homeopathic Guilt (Score:2, Interesting)
Facebook got rich (Score:2)
Now Facebook can show extra $850 million in profit. Under GAAP, stock based compensations are counted as expenses, so this directly translates to profit.
Hero (Score:2)
Brian Acton, a founder of WhatsApp, which he (along with the other founder) sold to Facebook for $19 billion four years ago, has grown tired of the social juggernaut. He left the company a year ago, and earlier this year, he surprised many when he tweeted "#DeleteFacebook", offering his support to what many described as a movement.
All good and well after he got his $19B. Will he be donating that to charity?
Did he know who the buyer was? (Score:1)
and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby?
"No ads, no games, no gimmicks"
Did he not know he was selling to Facebook???
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What makes up the other 2%, if not from ads?
Investing the money they made from Ads. They also might have other miscellaneous things like peering/licensing agreements, renting out unused space in property they own, etc...
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was going to come from? If the users don't pay, their privacy will. Until someone figures out a biz model that actually makes the users customers instead of the product, this will continue.
This isn't a very hard business model. Facebook makes less than $2/month per user. They could easily offer a version of their service for $2/month where they stopped tracking, stopped displaying ads, and protected your privacy. Even at $5/month or more there would likely be some users that would pay for it. Many other companies already offer an ad-free version of their product.
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Right but the friction and cost of payments and the regulation involved with becoming a payments processor erases the possibility of utilizing micro transactions. So our micro transaction conduit is ad revenue.
$2-$5/month is above the microtransaction level. Redbox has a very successful model with those amounts and Netflix is only slightly higher. Microtransactions sound great in theory and I would occasionally pay 25 cents to read a random article but something like Facebook would likely not work well with microtransaction even if they existed. Would you charge 5 cents a page load? This would literally reinvent the term "nickle and diming". A small monthly or yearly subscription would make more sense. Lo
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Lots of people would pay $20/year to remove ads from Facebook and the friction would be minimal on a yearly subscription.
I wouldn't. Facebook has already shown itself to play fast and loose with users' privacy, and I couldn't trust that they wouldn't continue to try to monetize users' data even if a subscription fee had been paid. I don't think I'm alone in this assessment.
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