The problem has never been that it's too difficult to make money from messaging. That would explain Zuckerberg's lack of drive to turn WhatsApp into a going concern. It will probably be the sacrificial offering that Zuckerberg needs to fend off antitrust regulators. And now, with Zuckerberg resolved to pivot to virtual reality, the app's real value is likely to come from something more ignoble than making money as a viable business. WhatsApp's place within the Meta hierarchy has bobbed up and down like a hydrofoil board. Beyond an announcement about the launch of a new customer chat service on WhatsApp in May, Zuckerberg has said little about messaging since. He announced that the future of the internet lay in the immersive world of the metaverse, representing the “next chapter” for newly named Meta. In March 2021, Zuckerberg announced his “privacy-focused vision for social networking” and predicted a future where communication would shift to private services like WhatsApp.īut seven months later, Zuckerberg's vision had changed. It looked for a while as if WhatsApp might actually become central to Facebook's future as a business.

But by 2020, Meta had backed away from that idea, and said it would try charging businesses to engage with customers on the app instead. After the sale, both eventually quit over how Meta was trying to monetize the app with advertising.

Founded in 2009, WhatsApp initially made money from a 99 cent annual subscription because its founders despised ads. It's astonishing that eight years after Zuckerberg made the acquisition, he has yet to turn WhatsApp into a remotely viable business. He bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, and it has contributed pennies by comparison. The contrast couldn't be more stark: Zuckerberg bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and the app contributed $20 billion to Facebook's revenue in 2019 alone.

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