Why no ads?

Tags: writing, movies, advertisement

Good piece of writing.

~~~
http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-ads/
~~~

Why we don't sell ads

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can
buy shit we don't need.
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Brian and I spent a combined 20 years at Yahoo!, working hard to keep the
site working. And yes, working hard to sell ads, because that's what Yahoo!
did. It gathered data and it served pages and it sold ads.

We watched Yahoo! get eclipsed in size and reach by Google. a more efficient
and more profitable ad seller. They knew what you were searching for, so
they could gather your data more efficiently and sell better ads.

These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your
interests, and they use it all to sell ads.

When we sat down to start our own thing together three years ago we wanted
to make something that wasn't just another ad clearinghouse. We wanted to
spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and
saved them money and made their lives better in a small way. We knew that we
could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we
could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads.

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep
thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep
excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who
they didn't). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake. and
that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to
see an advertisement.

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your
intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company
that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their
day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal
data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all
being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out. And at
the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising
banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new
features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing
rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our
product and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are
simply not interested in any of it.

When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say "Have you considered
the alternative?"