I assume the motivation for pulling this out of the archive is the WhatsApp purchase. However, I don't think this comparison is truly fair. Not only is WhatsApp monthly adding over twice the userbase ICQ had at the time of purchase, but it is also actually collecting revenue from them. WhatsApp is a real company with real monetization strategies.
ICQ in 1999 had about 45 million users. There were only 248 million internet users back in 1999. That's 18% of mostly international users.
AOL was optimistic. So much so this is the actual response when they beat the street during their earning reports.
"(ICQ is) growing like a weed," said AOL President Bob Pittman. "Monetizing it" will be "relatively easy," he added.
WhatsApp has 450 million users where there are 2.7 billion internet users. 16%. Of mostly international users. Where, again, monetizing it, should be relatively easy.
But then again, why does any of this matter?
Genie's out of the bottle. The game has changed. We're playing a game of scaling now. Less than a hundred dedicated folks can change the world.
That 19 billion is a clarion call to attract even more people to what it is most of us here have been doing for decades.
If there is to be a singularity moment for the generation that grew up remembering the difference between real life and internet life, we have arrived at the internet life.
Yes. Met Yair and Sefi (two of tech founders) via my uncle who was doing biz Dev for them. I was writing a shareware win32 app at the time called "AoLOL!", an add on for AOL 2.5 and up that would extend the AOL toolbar and add a bunch of features. One of those features was called "keep in touch". You could specify a list of AOl screen names and it would run through that list and perform AOL'd "check if online" function. It would tell you if your friends are online and of so, what chat room they're in (if any). A precursor to the "buddy list."
The icq guys are Israeli. My parents are Israeli. I spoke Hebrew fluently. I helped them fix the broken English on their web site. Later I gave them access to my AOL account so they could take a close look at AOL's buddy list when it did launch.
They also offered me UIN (the icq #) "007". I laughed it off, didn't even know at the time what 007 meant.
Always wondered what would have been if I was a few years older, not living with my parents, able to drive, and would have taken their offer seriously. To me they really kicked off the dotcom boom and for me, my focus in startups.
It surprises you? Pretty big chance that a programmer once offered an ICQ job is on HN these days and would comment in a thread about the Mirabilis purchase.
ICQ was revolutionary at the time. Both in terms of early-game instant messaging, and the deal these guys struck with AOL. I remember everybody talking about it in Israel at the time. (iirc) Four founders in their early twenties each making around $40mil was quite a shock.
Even though it's a bit sad to see things didn't really evolve much since then, the bubble bursted a little later, and those kind of eyeballs-based "business-models" collapsed. I wonder if these kind of deals are the canary of another bubble bursting?
This is key. People seem to forget that 15 years ago the Internet was new and not many people used it or had access to it.
I imagine that in 15 years (fingers crossed) we'll reflect the same situation where we assume everyone has access to the Internet and not just several billion people :)
I remember when switching from ICQ to Microsoft Messenger thinking "good riddance". Messenger employed the not the least bit novel approach of letting users sign in using a self selected textual screen name.
My god those were awesome. A great friend of mine typed in his name, Ben LastName. It said it was taken, but how about Ovenproof Ben? Mine was also taken, how about Mucous Robin? Both have stuck. Its name generator was fantastically random.
I can't believe I can remember mine as well (10407923). I don't even remember my old phone number that I had at the time, or the address of where I lived!
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison to make. Most of their revenue comes after the first year. With the growth they had last year and current growth, their revenue should exponentially rise over 2014 and 2015.
Also, I wonder if being bought by facebook could help reduce hardware costs by utilizing facebook's infustracture
Whatsapp makes extremely little revenue right now - like it would take Facebook hundreds of years to recuperate what they paid [1]. Even if it doubles in user-base and grows by an order of magnitude (on top of that) through some magic Facebook monetization strategy, it would still take them decades.
But if we discount the fact that Facebook mostly paid their own "worthless" (mostly overhyped/overvalued) stock for this overvalued Whatsapp acquisition, then maybe with an order of magnitude profit, they could recover the money somewhere between 10-20 years.
For Facebook's sake, they better hope some other new disruptive technology doesn't come along in the next 10-20 years, because they won't be able to keep this sort of acquisition strategy for long.
I've noticed some articles call Facebook/Zuckerberg "smart" for noticing Whatsapp is disrupting them - if you can call noticing a disruption so late in the game that you now have to pay $19 billion to buy it, and with almost zero expectations of recovering the bulk of the money in the next decade.
What would be much smarter is using your own engineers to build that next disruption, or at least buy the ones appearing very early in the game. Zuckerberg could've bought tens of such apps in their early days a few years ago, and he'd still be much better off today. He could've owned Whatsapp, Kik, Viber, Line, and many others for much less.
[1] - Analysis of Whatsapp's revenue and profit when it had half the user-base it has today:
"What would be much smarter is using your own engineers to build that next disruption"
Could they, though? Facebook's DNA is information accumulation. As is Google's.
WhatsApp is the antithesis of this, and the likely outcome of this acquisition is the gradual decline of the product as people flock to whatever new, unburdened, anonymous replacement comes along.
But for a while it will boost the stock price because it keeps user engagement seemingly high.
WhatsApp had revenues of $20 million last year -- clearly much lower than their userbase -- and from reports on here most people were unaware any $1 per year thing even existed. Their site doesn't seem to even mention the $1 thing, but instead declares -- without time restriction -- that it is entirely free.
