It does seem weird that 1.5 billion people use WhatsApp every day and yet the service makes no money from them whatsoever. Time for a revamp on that business model.
What it means: In case you missed the memo, Facebook owns WhatsApp – and Facebook's been having a tough time recently. They've lost a lot of money out of the whole privacy scandal thing and people aren't sure they'll recover.
So they're turning to WhatsApp to bring in the $$. They've launched a platform called WhatsApp Business, which 3 million people already use. At the moment it's free, but the plan is to turn it into paid service for businesses to reach their customers, sorting things like deliveries, tickets, or general queries.
Companies can chat with customers for free as long as they respond to messages within 24 hours. If not, they get charged between 0.3p and 7p per message. They'll also pay fees for confirmed delivery.
Uber and Booking.com are among the first businesses to give it a go.
