You the User
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.
Damn, that's a strong statement and bold stance. Who wrote that?
Oh. Well this is awkward.
Those words were written by Jan Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp. That post, really outlining the core ethos of the company as directed Koum and his co-founder Brian Acton was written exactly 13 years ago. Not even two years later, the company was acquired by Facebook. Yes, the social media giant that made basically 100% of their money from advertising.
Sure, promises were seemingly made about running autonomously and not breaching that user commitment and trust, but obviously Koum and Acton had about 19 billion reasons to do the deal – and actually, far more today, given how much of it was in stock.1 As those promises started to bend and the pressure started to ramp, the founders were gone – sound familiar? – and WhatsApp was just sitting there as an untapped surface...
As it turns out, the best way to ensure your product doesn't get exploited by ads may not be to sell to an advertising company.
Given the move to now show ads within WhatsApp – yes, yes, not in your conversations right now, but we all know which way this goes, which is only in the direction of more ads – it's honestly sort of remarkable that this post is still live on the company blog, as surfaced yesterday by John Gruber. It's just such a damning take down of the company that WhatsApp would ultimately sell to. We can argue about whether they're breaching some sort of actual agreement here with this move, but they're absolutely shattering the spirit of the early company.
That post also kicks off with a quote, actually:
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.– Tyler Durden, Fight Club
As it turns out, maybe you are your fucking khakis.
1 The original deal terms called for $4B in cash and $12B in Facebook shares – and potentially $3B more in shares based on earn-outs. At the time of the deal, the stock was trading around $65/share. Today, it's trading at $700/share. Those $15B worth of Facebook shares in 2014 would be worth around $160B today. Remarkably, both Acton and Koum left before they fully vested the earn-outs. They still did okay, I think.