Facebook noticed that the main ways for them to earn money are through advertising. Mark Zuckerberg is a great strategist and he keeps acquiring famous companies that continue their operation as independent entities with a condition where their company is under Facebook’s umbrella.
In the year 2012, Instagram (an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service) has been bought over by Facebook for $1 billion dollar in cash and stock. By that time, Instagram was less than two years in the market and it had no revenue. But by the end of the year, citigroup estimated the actual worth of Instagram is around $35 billion, based on the amount of their monthly active users which reached 300 million users. Not too long after they bought over Instagram, Facebook launched a new video features for Instagram that record up to 15 seconds of content which is the perfect length of mobile ads.
How does Instagram make money?
Instagram doesn't make any money through their users download of their apps since Instagram is free for everyone to download, but they make money from advertising just like Facebook. A portion of income are came from Instagram, where they introduced a paid advertising service in 2013. Since then, companies like Nike Inc., General Electric and Walt Disney Co. has been using their service.
Currently Whatsapp has a total of 450 million active monthly users. It reached that number faster than any other platform in the history, and the amount of active users are increasing continuously and it might reach at a staggering rate of 1 million users a day.
How does Whatsapp make money?
The answer for this question is $1 dollar at a time. Whatsapp is free to use for the first year and users are require to pay a small amount of money which is $1 dollar each subsequent year if they wish to continue with the service. It may sound like a small amount of money and its possible for them to make money just by that way. But if u calculate it, with over 700 million active user and 1 million active users everyday, the annual income for Whatsapp can reach up to $700 million. Now you know how Whatsapp make their money.
Reason behind it
Zuckerberg won't buy a company without any solid reason, the reason for Zuckerberg for buying Whatsapp is still going to be the same reason as Instagram which is advertising. With the amount of active users all over the world, Zuckerberg believe that Whatsapp is another good advertising platform and have a really good potential for it.
Oculus Rift & Private Core
The image of a user using the Oculus Rift during a gameplay
Just before Zuckerberg bought Whatapp, Zuckerberg invested $2 billion dollar when he purchased the Oculus VR, maker of Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. This means that the future for this company is stable compare when they isn't with Facebook.
The latest purchase in their cart list is the Palo Alto-based secure server technology company, Private Core. Reason for Facebook to buy this company is to deploy the technology of Private Core into their existing server stack in order to have a better protection on its own server and all of Facebook users data.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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