WhatsApp의 190억 달러 인수: 비즈니스 모델과 암호화

### 페이스북의 190억 달러 규모의 왓츠앱 도박: 예상치 못한 출처, 종단 간 암호화, 그리고 비즈니스 전략
* 💰 2014년 Facebook은 WhatsApp의 **2023년 매출이 3억 8,200만 달러로 상대적으로 낮았음에도 불구하고**, 주로 비즈니스 메시징 플랫폼인 WhatsApp을 **190억 달러에 인수**했습니다.
* 🌍 WhatsApp의 성공은 주로 **미국에 비해 SMS 서비스의 신뢰성이나 가격이 저렴하지 않은 해외 시장**에서 이루어졌습니다.
* 🔐 보안 문제와 정부의 감시를 해결하기 위해 WhatsApp은 **X3 DH 키 교환 프로토콜**을 사용하여 메시지를 보호하는 **엔드투엔드 암호화**를 구현했습니다.
* 🦉 WhatsApp의 공동 창업자 브라이언 액튼이 투자한 라이벌 메시징 앱인 **Signal도 동일한 암호화 프로토콜**을 사용합니다.
* 📈 광고를 통해 WhatsApp에서 수익을 창출하려는 **Facebook의 원래 계획은 창업자들의 저항**에 부딪혔고, 결국 **창업자들은 회사를 떠나게 되었습니다.**
* 🕵 Facebook은 **전화번호, 연락처, 사용 로그, 디바이스 세부 정보 등 WhatsApp 사용자로부터 다양한 데이터 포인트**를 수집하며, 이를 기존 데이터와 결합하여 타겟팅 광고에 활용할 수 있습니다.
* 🏢 WhatsApp은 소규모 상점부터 대기업에 이르기까지 전 세계 비즈니스에 중요한 커뮤니케이션 도구로 발전해왔으며, **WhatsApp 상점 및 결제**와 같은 기능을 제공하고 있습니다.
* 🤖 일부에서는 다양한 기능을 하나의 플랫폼에 결합하는 **WhatsApp의 '슈퍼 앱' 방식**을 비판하기도 하지만, 이는 사용자들의 활용 방식에 대한 플랫폼의 적응을 반영한 것입니다.

WhatsApp이 190억 달러에 인수되면서 비즈니스 메시징에서 3억 8,200만 달러의 매출을 올렸음에도 불구하고 수익성과 전략적 가치에 대한 의문이 제기되었습니다.

something's really fishy about WhatsApp. It's been 10 years since made-up Facebook announced that it was buying the company for $22 billion. He's spending 19 billion dollars to buy it. Why did you do it? And what does it mean? And you would think that the reason behind this is obvious: more data to their algorithm, figuring out what you're discussing with your friends and serving you ads about it. And then there's the strategic value and what we can do together. But to this day, made a swears that all texts in WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted, that they don't use them for ads. So is that true? I'm going to get back to that, don't worry. According to Ma's public filings, WhatsApp made $382 million in 2023, mostly from their business messaging platform. So that's how WhatsApp makes money. End the video. No, wait, of course, that's pennies compared to the 19 billion dollars that Zck paid to acquire WhatsApp. Where's the ROI? ROI: return on investment. It would literally take 49 years to recover the investment.

at this rate, why would he buy this not very profitable platform instead of using that money? I don't know, to buy either of these countries or fill 11,000 stadiums with 19 billion Rubber Chickens, or making movers that people actually want to use. So, what was the real angle for buying WhatsApp? Let's go back to the infamous announcement because it did take everyone by surprise. This was and still is one of the largest tech acquisitions in history, just shy of a Slack or LinkedIn. But those companies had real business models at the time. WhatsApp had around 450 million active users. Only OG app users ever paid anything, their $1 yearly fee. But beyond that, most people have never paid a single dollar for WhatsApp. Now, part of the reason for all this fuzz on WhatsApp being overvalued is that much of WhatsApp's success, their original product market fit, was mainly outside of the US 'cause America didn't really need a WhatsApp. Blurry photos, weird likes, you know, if your group has different phones, just use WhatsApp. The Americans have had

decent unlimited SMS and MMS, with all other 300 million Americans, but that wasn't a thing for the rest of the world. I'm Costa Rican, and when you hail from a smaller country, you have friends abroad, you travel outside the country, so you would need something back then. You would need something like Skype to be able to be in touch with your friends, or in even larger countries like India, SMS kind of sucked back then, but this was solved in the states, so much so that the founder of WhatsApp didn't even build WhatsApp for texting. WhatsApp started in 2009, founded 5 years earlier by Jan k, a former Yahoo employee. Again, replacing SMS was not a problem that needed solving in the US, so Jan's idea was more of a status update platform. So you would post public updates to your friends, and you would only see your friends' updates when you open the app. So that thing wasn't doing great, by the way. It was not. It wasn't easy finding OG WhatsApp screenshots. This version only really

ran for a few months and only for a handful of people, and it didn't do so well. Jan had enlisted his Russian friend Alex Fishman, and they were working with a freelancer called Igor Solomnikov. Sorry if I butcher your name, man. Mid-2009, Apple started allowing push notifications with, wait for it, iOS 3. So now you could get status updates even when you weren't using WhatsApp, and a handful of early users started posting updates that felt more like texts, and the company could read them because they were designed as public updates. And so the WhatsApp team figured that they'd chase that use case, ride the wave, and then they released the WhatsApp Messenger in August 2009, and it blew up. It quickly grew to 250,000 users, and people were loving it. And this is when Brian Acton joined, who was another Yahoo employee, and he convinced a few friends to invest as well. And as part of this deal, he got co-founder status. Wait, so why does he get to call himself a

co-founder. If he came in later with money, kind of reminds me of another co-founder debacle we covered last week because WhatsApp was originally designed as a status update service. Encryption was not a concern at this point. Before 2011, WhatsApp just used a verification text to activate your phone number and text other people. So if New York me wants to send something to Costa Rica me, I'm basically writing a message on a piece of paper that travels the internet. The server gets to the destination as a public message. People on the internet can see it, the router can see it, and WhatsApp's server can definitely see it. So in this version of WhatsApp, any texts you exchange were readable by the owner of the company, by the servers, right? The servers could see the text, and they could have potentially used that to target ads. Also, in 2011, this company called WhatsApp Hack discovered an exploit that would allow them to intercept the verification SMS that you send to activate a device and potentially use that to hack into your account and read your text. So WhatsApp

figured they needed to do something about it, and that something was encryption. But to understand encryption, we need an explainer. Time. Their first attempt at encryption was to create an encrypted connection with the server so that the message would travel encrypted through the internet. And the problem with this was that many people figured out how to hijack accounts, hackers, or often security researchers, and more crucially to our story, the message in WhatsApp servers could have been visible 'cause the server had the key to see it, which means that the message in Facebook servers after the acquisition could also be visible. Senator, we run ads. I'm oversimplifying here, but bear with me. The point is that even before the acquisition, WhatsApp had gotten too popular too quickly, and governments had started to raise flags against using WhatsApp because of these security issues. So they had to do something about it, and so end-to-end encryption became the only solution. But before I talk about that, I should talk about Freshsales, the AI-powered CRM product from Freshworks and the sponsor for today's video. Fresh

sales is a super easy-to-use sales product that can get your team started from day one without any training. With built-in email, phone, chat, SMS, and of course, WhatsApp support, salespeople can connect with their prospects right from the CRM and engage with context of what has been said before. It lets you automate that boring repetitive task and set up automated sequences so prospects are engaged without any additional manual work. Sales teams can manage their deals across stages. They can send signed contracts and track quotas to ensure their numbers are always on the rise. And with the Fair Sales mobile app, they can stay connected even when they're on the go. What's more, Fair Sales is powered by Freddy AI, which is this AI-powered assistance that helps sales teams identify high-intent leads and craft personalized emails to boost conversions. Freddy also spotlights promising deals and recommends actions so you're always a step ahead. If you're a startup looking for a new CRM or simply to move away from your current setup, you should check them out. Their basic plans start at

just $9 okay so in ENT an encryption I have created a key. This is called a private key. It's a much longer number than this one, but the point is it's completely secret. Nobody should know what this is. And then create two public keys and send them over the Internet. Everyone will be able to see them 'cause they're live on the internet, but that's okay. The receiver gets these keys. He has his own private key and he uses it to create a mush combination of numbers that include both the public keys and his private key. So the receiver then sends all this gibberish back to the original sender who now puts his own key into it and sends a message back. So anybody who intercepted any of these messages can see this, but all they have is the public keys and they can't decrypt the message. The origin for this key exchange mechanism is called the Diffy Helman key exchange protocol, and this is old '70s old school '70s cryptography. WhatsApp uses a newer version of this called the X3 DH which

is the extended triple Diffy Helman mechanism, which is even more secure. But the point is that the only way, the only way to decode this, is to know one of the two private keys. So now, you can send these messages through any server, public or private, and the only device that can see the original message is your friend's device. And this is the standard for most messaging apps these days. One of the reasons why iMessage became so popular early on was because it was one of the first ones to do it, and that actually got them in trouble with the police because there are no back doors with end-to-end encryption. So if the FBI wants to see someone's texts, they can't. Apple can't. So now, unless the Zuck has some reptile AI supercomputer hidden in his data centers, I'm going to have to go with no. I am not a lizard. Current computing power would take 3 * 10 to the power 59 to decrypt your message, which is a lot more than the age of the universe, 13.8.

billion years. The end toin encryption that I've just described to you is the same one that Signal uses. Signal is, of course, WhatsApp's rival. It's a nonprofit organization, mostly funded by Brian Acton, one of the co-founders of WhatsApp, which makes this whole thing kind of poetic if you think about it. But that is really the last happy note in this video because Facebook has done everything it can to mine as much data as it can from WhatsApp, and it has kind of succeeded at that. Privacy-focused messaging platform has to be encrypted by all accounts. Things were pretty rushed when the acquisition was negotiated. Facebook was desperate to buy WhatsApp, in part because the founders had also visited Google in Mountain View around that time, and they were worried that Google might beat them to the acquisition. And that's in part what prompted the crazy number and some flexibility in the negotiations. If we can do a pretty good job of helping um WhatsApp to grow, that this is just going to be a huge business because as part of the sale, WhatsApp Founders

agreed to a few things with Mark. Some were kind of like verbal agreements, some on paper. There was an actual clause in the contract that said that they could collect all of their stock if Facebook started implementing monetization initiatives without their consent. But soon after they joined, Brian recalls overhearing Facebook's projections for WhatsApp Revenue: $10 billion per year by 2019. I mean you have to recover that ROI, and that $10 billion plan was, by all means, to put ads on WhatsApp starting with status updates. Businesses obviously need to make money, and even Brian understood this, but his proposal was a metered usage model for people who exceeded a certain number of messages in a month. You build it once, it runs everywhere, in every country. You don't need a sophisticated Salesforce. It's a very simple business, but Cheryl Sandberg threw away the idea. Her words were, It won't scale. I called her out one time. I was like, No, you don't mean that it won't scale, you mean it won't make as much.

money as and she kind of hemmed and hot a little after only a couple of years. Brian and Jan understood that they were not going to win this battle. As altruistic as their original vision for WhatsApp might have been, they had given that away when they took Facebook's check. And of course, let's be real, who wouldn't take the $19 million check? But these disagreements escalated to them eventually leaving the company. In case of Brian, before his stock had fully vested, which meant leaving being about $800 million behind. He's still a billionaire, so don't worry. He was like, Okay, well, you want to do these things I don't want to do. It's better if I get out of your way. And I did. Facebook's first broken promise was linking your WhatsApp profile to their servers and to your Facebook account. And it did that just 2 years after the buy, after actually promising that they wouldn't. It was an easy case for the EU Trade Commission that slapped them with a measly 110 million EUR fine. They've

made a bunch of privacy updates over their years. Yes, keeping is encrypted, but now with access to your phone number, your contacts, logs of how much and how often you use WhatsApp, information about how you interact with other users, device identifiers, and other device details like IP address, operating system, browser details, battery health information, app version, mobile network, language, and time zone. And this may feel harmless, but combine that with Facebook or maas already huge library of data, your Facebook profile, your Instagram profile, your friends profiles, your photos, the friends that you stalk, and most crucially your online activity. Most people don't know this, but the Facebook pixel is key to this. I as a website business, I am encouraged to put a Facebook pixel on my page so that when you visit, I can then serve you retargeting ads back on Facebook, but with that, Facebook now knows which websites you visited, and at least 177% of all websites in the world have a Facebook pixel installed. So even if an ad suddenly feels strangely related to what you were just texting about, chances

are the Zuck knows what you're talking about without even having to read that text. But that isn't WhatsApp's endgame. Americans don't generally know this one, but WhatsApp has become the operating system for business communication in many countries around the world. From talking to your bank, to ordering food, to booking appointments, to customer support and sales, entire economies in the developing world operate on WhatsApp. Genuinely and honestly, quite sadly, even governments. For large businesses, online shopping has moved well online. For large department store, the way to maximize sales beyond the physical location is to build an e-commerce platform, hire a shipping company, establish call center chat support, and all the stuff that you need with a decent e-commerce. But for a small Mom and Pop Shop, the way to talk to their customers is WhatsApp. They have no budget for websites or fancy chat support tools. They operate not only on what they know how to use, but also on where their customers are and where it's easier for them to get in touch. And in part because of the ease of use for

customers, larger and larger companies have now moved to WhatsApp from banks to car dealerships. As a business, you can even set up your own Facebook and Instagram ads from your WhatsApp profile, unlocking this batch of millions of advertisers who are probably not very experienced at maintaining paid advertising campaigns on the usual platforms. They're probably going to overspend. You also have WhatsApp shops and WhatsApp payments, which does require some information to leave the safe pathway of end-to-end encryption so that they can actually put a charge on your card. This is not the only exception to the rule because businesses can choose to store messages you send to them in Facebook servers. Remember, encryption protects your messages through their journey, but after that, it's really up to the recipient. So, you know, kids, if you're sending eggplant pictures, well, you know the risks. I absolutely hate this WhatsApp super app approach. By the way, I threw out two drafts of this strip that were mostly just rants against WhatsApp because I like my apps separate, one for

texting with friends and one for browsing store content. I think it's a lazy and terrible use. Your experience just put everything on the same place. That's just me, but I generally don't know if anyone foresaw this concept of WhatsApp becoming the operating system for small businesses. But you have to give it to them. They are adapting to what people are using the platform for. So to mark this is the next chapter in his company. So well, I guess so long for the metaverse. But enough with the fun in games. It's time for everyone's favorite work.

WhatsApp’s SECRET Business Model (It’s Not Reading your Texts)

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190억 달러 규모의 WhatsApp 인수: 의심스러운 투자

Facebook이 WhatsApp을 190억 달러에 인수하면서 2023년 수익이 3억 8,200만 달러에 불과하다는 점에서 수익성에 대한 의문이 제기되었습니다.

이 앱의 성공은 주로 미국 외 지역에서 이루어졌는데, SMS가 더 보편화된 미국과는 달리 저렴한 메시징 서비스에 대한 니즈를 충족시켰기 때문입니다.

상태 업데이트 플랫폼이라는 WhatsApp의 원래 아이디어는 성공하지 못했고, 연간 1달러의 요금을 지불하는 소수의 사용자에 의존하는 매출로 인해 인수의 ROI에 대한 회의론이 제기되었습니다.

WhatsApp은 2009년에 몇몇 사용자가 공개 업데이트를 게시하는 소규모 프로젝트로 시작되었습니다.

하지만 2009년 8월 WhatsApp 메신저가 출시된 후 빠르게 25만 명의 사용자로 성장하며 주목을 받기 시작했습니다.

앱의 초기 버전은 주고받은 모든 문자를 회사 서버에서 읽을 수 있어 잠재적인 개인정보 보호 및 보안 문제가 발생할 수 있다는 우려를 불러일으켰습니다.

이러한 우려로 인해 WhatsApp은 이러한 문제를 해결하고 사용자와 정부의 신뢰를 얻기 위한 솔루션으로 엔드투엔드 암호화를 구현하게 되었습니다.

공정한 영업: 고급 기능을 갖춘 CRM

Fair Sales는 잠재 고객의 참여를 유도하기 위한 커뮤니케이션 채널과 자동화가 내장된 사용자 친화적인 CRM입니다.

이 CRM은 영업팀을 위한 거래 관리, 계약서 전송, 할당량 추적 기능을 제공합니다.

또한, 구매 의향이 높은 리드를 식별하기 위한 AI 기반 지원을 제공하며 이동 중에도 액세스할 수 있는 모바일 앱을 제공합니다.

암호화 프로토콜의 원조인 X3 DH는 높은 수준의 보안을 제공하여 개인 키 없이는 메시지를 해독하기 어렵습니다.

WhatsApp과 Facebook의 격동적인 관계

WhatsApp의 비영리 라이벌인 Signal도 동일한 암호화 기술을 사용합니다.

Facebook은 WhatsApp 인수가 절실했기 때문에 유연하고 급하게 협상을 진행했습니다.

WhatsApp을 통해 100억 달러의 수익을 창출하겠다는 Facebook의 계획을 우연히 들은 공동 창업자 브라이언 액튼은 미터링 사용 모델을 제안했지만 거부당했고, 의견 충돌이 이어져 결국 창업자들이 회사를 떠났습니다.

WhatsApp 데이터 수집의 개인정보 보호 문제

WhatsApp은 전화번호, 연락처, 사용자 상호 작용, 디바이스 세부 정보에 대한 액세스를 포함해 수년 동안 데이터 수집을 크게 늘려왔습니다.

이 앱은 Facebook과의 연결을 통해 사용자의 온라인 활동을 광범위하게 추적할 수 있으며, 수많은 웹사이트가 Facebook 픽셀을 사용하고 있습니다.

또한 WhatsApp은 특히 개발도상국에서 비즈니스 커뮤니케이션을 위한 중요한 도구로 자리 잡았으며, 사용 편의성과 접근성으로 인해 소규모 비즈니스에서 고객과의 소통에 널리 사용되고 있습니다.

비즈니스를 위한 WhatsApp의 성장하는 역할

현재 점점 더 많은 비즈니스에서 광고, 상점 설정, 결제 처리를 위해 WhatsApp을 사용하고 있으며, 이는 경험이 부족한 광고주들의 과도한 지출로 이어질 수 있습니다.

소규모 비즈니스를 위한 운영체제로의 플랫폼 전환은 데이터 프라이버시 및 암호화에 대한 우려를 불러일으키고 있습니다.

이러한 비판에도 불구하고 WhatsApp은 사용자의 요구에 적응하며 비즈니스 세계에서 그 역할을 확대하고 있습니다.