Facebook on Wednesday
evening discussed about the surprising news of the acquisition of
popular messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and company
shares.
Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg started off by discussing how his company is moving towards
being a more mobile focused company, and said WhatsApp was the perfect
compliment to its goals of connecting everyone on the planet. He also
said that he want to add the projected WhatsApp to have 1 billion users within the next few years.
The details of the deal
were explained a bit more clearly with the financials breaking down as
$4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and another $3
billion in restricted shares that will vest in four years for the
WhatsApp employees.
After some discussion Zuckerberg
immediately said just how separate WhatsApp would be from Facebook. In
his view WhatsApp will best be served to continue working on its own and
following the roadmap it has already set out for itself. This naturally
led to questions about when we would see advertising showing up on
WhatsApp, but Zuckerberg said that he didn’t see advertising as the best
method to monetizing messaging, and Koum agreed. They didn’t go into
detail on what their plans were, but Koum said the strategy is long-term
and not something we would see showing up any time soon.
One of the biggest
questions on a lot of users’ minds is whether Facebook Messenger, being
one of the social network’s most popular services, could be setting
itself up for potential cannibalization. “Facebook Messenger
isn’t about real-time communication. It’s more along the lines that you
send someone a message and expect a reply later in the day almost like
e-mail,” Zuckerberg said in regards to Messenger. “WhatsApp is more
about real-time and we see those as two very different use cases,” he
went on to add.
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