My guess is, because instant messaging only works with multiple people. The usfullness of an IM service is directly coupled to the amount of your peers using it. If there is no one to talk two, why bother?

Sure, you and I may be happy to pay this, and may even fork out the fee for our loved ones, but how many other people would do that?

Ads if you don't want to pay, no ads if you want to pay. If there is any problem with that, I fail to see it. The only thing I can really think of is that it is not economically worthwhile - the expectation is that so few people will be willing to pay or leave because of ads, that the added complexity is not worth it. You could then try to throw in some random stuff - larger file size limits, more GIFs, different skins, or whatever might work and is not too expensive - in order to motivate more people to pay, but this might again be an opportunity for a competitor who could offer your bonus stuff also to the masses that are happy with ads.

I don't know how valid it is from a data perspective, but the concern that is usually voiced in response to the idea (to disable ads after payment) is that your overall ad value declines once you provide ways for the (presumably) wealthy part of your audience to opt out.

> Sure, you and I may be happy to pay this, and may even fork out the fee for our loved ones, but how many other people would do that?

I was thinking exactly that while reading the beginning of your post. I'd be ready to accept a part of my fee is to allow others to use the service but it'd need to be balanced so freeloaders don't tip off the balance. Maybe premium stickers packs or some vanity stuff. Or they can `choose` to pay by granting access to their ad profile and marketing tracking ?

Whatsapp almost reached one billion monthly users before they changed from paid (1$/year) to free.

I was one of those! It was so little money for the amount of use I was getting out of it. I wish the aquisition by facebook had encouraged facebook to go with such a model. I'd happily pay e.g. €10/year to get rid of all the ads and "Suggested for you" junk and have a news feed that is just my friends and groups I joined again.

Not sure about the exact numbers, but there is one thing to keep in mind: a significant part of those users were in "developing markets", where the fee was never introduced in practice. WhatsApp kept granting free extensions to them until they ditched the paid plan completely. I think that their next billion or two users have also been mostly in markets that wouldn't have been subject to the fee anyway.

I was a relatively early adopter of Whatsapp and although the banner to pay 1 USD/year was shown to me, I just pressed the "use whatsapp free for a year" button whenever the popup reappeared. I never ended up paying anything to WA.

So you give a choice, either pay $5 a year, or view adverts

As others have pointed out before that requires some serious guts because the people who are well enough off to pay their way out of ads are exactly the ones that might be most attractive to show ads to.

So, not impossible at all but will need someone to take a principled stance.

> Why can't the old WA model be used?

I don't think WhatsApp was profitable on that model, and they also had surprisingly low costs (due to great server tech, small team) that I suspect Telegram can't match.