How does WhatsApp make money??

[FusionChefGeoff]

Just interested really - there's no adds, no premium upgrade service, no tangible data that can be sold (or is there???).

How does one would argue the most ubiquitous and widely used app ever actually make any money and are they likely to start charging for it soon?!

They're probably paid by some government body to monitor data.

It's owned by facebook. Therefore it probably doesn't need to and it would have other benefits than direct profit...

I google this a few weeks ago and PP is correct - it's owned by Facebook so doesn't need to make money. The value for them is the data they can gather to target your ads on other sites.

FB has to acquire it as it was too much competition for FB Messenger. So the original owners made billions from that. And yes, data from Whatsapp msgs is used, FB advertising is targeted using data monitored from Whatsapp msgs, so that’s part of its worth to FB now.

Wow thanks - that's seriously cool and also terrifying in the same breath!