WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature.
Meta says it will tailor the ads to your interests by using “limited” information, including your country or city, language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with ads on the platform. You can also change your ad preferences from Meta’s Accounts Center.
This isn’t the only change Meta is making to WhatsApp. The company will also start showing promoted channels when you click on the Explore button to find new ones to follow. It’s also rolling out the ability to subscribe to channels to “receive exclusive updates” as well.
Yes but my entire point is that it just isn’t comparable because of the insane scales we’re talking about. For example, WhatsApp has 2 billion monthly active users. Let’s say Signal had the same number and let’s say it costs them 0.5$ per user per year (probably an underestimate). That’s 1 billion dollars in yearly expenses. Wikipedia, which is one of the most successful donation based companies to my knowledge, has a yearly income of only 180 million $. I just don’t see there being enough donation capacity in the general population to sustain that high of a figure.
GrapheneOS might be fine even with 2 bilion users with the same amount of funding as they have now, because their costs aren’t tied to their userbase. But scaling Signal to the size we’re talking about is an entirely different beast.
I’d say that they are. Graphene has to serve up the installs for all the different devices they support. That’s a lot of data to shift. On top of that there is pumping out updates every second day. Then there is user support. All of these will scale.
I don’t know why this point is so important to you. Of course the two organisations aren’t 100% comparible but there are strong similarities. Both are tech, both nonprofit, both offering a free product for the greater good and both rely on donations. Both will have costs that scale - they might not be the same to-the-penny but they will exist. Thats just the nature of the beast.