Since the takeover in 2014, the Facebook group Meta has struggled to monetize the WhatsApp chat service. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now announcing a big step in this direction.
The Facebook group Meta is taking the biggest step so far to make money with its expensive acquisition of WhatsApp. The chat service opens up the platform for all interested parties, which companies can use to communicate with their customers via WhatsApp.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made it clear in the announcement on Thursday that the offer would appeal to both small and large companies.
WhatsApp changed its terms of use for the new service last year. Concerns that more data from the chat service should be shared with Facebook caused a lot of excitement. The group always emphasized that the adjustments were only about creating a framework for communication between companies and their customers.
The Facebook group bought WhatsApp in 2014 for around 22 billion dollars. Before that, WhatsApp lived on the fee of one dollar per year, but after the takeover, Facebook struggled to establish a new business model for the service. There are repeated calls in politics that WhatsApp must be split off from Meta in order to ensure more competition for chat services.
