WhatsApp CEO doesn’t plan to make money from the app

/1//10//11//12/Koum says that revenue is not the top priority, they should rather concentrate on the growth for the next couple of years

Whatsapp’s acquisition by Facebook was quite an important one and we couldn’t simply get over the huge deal as it was all over the internet. Much like everyone else, it appears that the CEO himself wasn’t so affected by the deal. Now that the messaging app is in the hands of the popular social networking site, /1//10//11//12/Koum doesn’t really care much about making money from it. He told Re/code’s Liz Gannes at the Code/Mobile conference on Tuesday that “Before [the acquisition] we experimented with monetization, we tried to charge in some countries. We didn’t have the long-term financial support of Facebook.”

The messaging app was taken away from Koum in February and the deal closed at a whopping sum of $19 billion after which Koum was also made a board member. While he was chatting about his app on the stage, he also talked about some other plans related to Whatsapp, particularly the voice call technology which he expects would make it to the app by the first quarter of the next year. However, keeping all this aside, the former Whatsapp CEO confessed that he has no such intentions of minting money out of the app. “For a bit, we can focus on growth only and not have to do any kind of experimentation with monetization,” he said.

These words somehow synced with what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been saying on numerous occasions. The team is certainly not keeping revenue as their top priority and it wont be so for the next couple of years.

source: recode

Zuckerberg: “Products aren’t really interesting as a business until they have a billion people using them.” *Every other company rolls eyes*— Kurt Wagner (@KurtWagner8) October 28, 2014