The 19 billion dollars that Facebook shelled out for Whatsapp has already been archived: whether this was an excessive sum or not will be revealed on the market in upcoming months and years. It is certain that the sector of icons continues to proceed at an impressive rate and seems to want to confirm the value given by Mark Zuckerberg for Jan Koum’s messaging application. Here below is a list of the five novelties in this area.
Mondadori buys Anobii
One of Italy’s biggest publishers recently bought, and for not a small sum, the social network from Hong Kong for literature enthusiasts. It is not just an application, but rather a platform. The mobile phone, however, is the origin of the revolution, which is still in act, regarding user’s reading habits. Mondadori is covered, from a hardware point of view, by an agreement with Kobo from Japan and with this move it demonstrates that it wants to fish from the bounty of reader’s opinions (300,000 Italians present in the case of Anobii). Inspiration was taken from Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads in March 2013: the social network was integrated into the new version of Kindle Paperwhite offering the possibility to interact, share phrases and passages, comment on and visualize what others are reading with just a few quick taps.
Buy Whatsapp for a friend
In this case it is not so much the economic wealth of users as it is the habit, increasingly more widespread, of paying online with dedicated tools. The messaging app requires a small annual fee and the latest update for Android allows a user to give a subscription to a friend. This should limit the flight of very young users who have neither credit card nor PayPal (Wind clients can also use Google Wallet) at their disposition towards free applications. And this is just one of the many barriers to overcome in offering a digital service.
Whisper is worth 200 million
We are still in the field of messaging applications with a solution that allows users to share things in an entirely anonymous way. Re/code recently reported that the app launched in March 2012 has obtained 30 million dollars in financing just six months after 21 million were collected in September. At this point the value of the app is about 200 million dollars.
Facebook talks about money with developers
The social network has set the date for its next conference for developers for 30 April. The main topic will be monetizing applications. Keeping in mind that Menlo Park began working last January on new formats for mobile advertising.
WeChat is worth 60 billion?
According to analysts at Crédit Lyonnais Securities Asia the Chinese application is worth at least 2-3 times that of Whatsapp. It has less users, 300 million versus 450), but a higher earning business model with its games, sale of stickers, and opportunities linked to electronic commerce and sponsorship. Whatsapp was assessed by the same analysts to be worth 35 billion dollars. The icon of Tencent could, therefore, be worth “at least 60”.
