WhatsApp Plans To Incorporate Airline, Bank Businesses In Place Of $1 Subscription Fee
Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp recently announced that it will ease its users the burden of paying for an annual $0.99 subscription fee after a year of free use. Chief Executive Jan Koum made the announcement at a recent Digital Life Design Conference held in Munich, Germany.
"Many WhatsApp users don't have a debit or credit card number and they worried they'd lose access to their friends and family after their first year. So over the next several weeks, we'll remove fees from the different versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service," Koum stated as he went over how asking users for a fee did not work well for the company, Straits Times reported Tuesday.
Koum clarified that they will not fill the loss with pop-up ads and spams, but will instead look for companies to partner with and expand the functionality of the application at the same time.
"Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight," the chief executive explained.
According to Tech Crunch of the companies that have partnered with WhatsApp are American Airlines and Bank of America. The popular messaging application will most likely launch more services once it has successfully begun its partnership with said companies.
Market analysts believe that this move by WhatsApp is a tactic to expand to third world countries as majority of its 900 million users are coming from the West. By getting rid of the subscription fee, many users will be enticed to use the chat application making it dominant in fields where its parent Facebook is weak at.
"As WhatsApp becomes more integrated with Facebook, it also adopts its monetization methodology," Recon Analytics' Entner told E-Commerce Times, implying that at the very least, the application is geared towards balancing the tele-market and strengthening Facebook.
