How would you monetize WhatsApp?

7 min readMay 12, 2019

For those who don’t know — WhatsApp Messenger is a freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP service owned by Facebook.

WhatsApp Customer Segments:

School, College, and University Students
Working Professionals
Old Age Senior Citizens
Business Owners

Business Goals:

Increase a new way to monetize the existing user base

Customer Use Cases (Why They Use WhatsApp):

Communication — It’s the most important thing we do on WhatsApp, communicate in form of chat, video or group with our friends and family. Typical reasons for communicating will be (On a high Level):
Know — I want to know what/how my friend(s) is(are) doing
Announce — I want to tell my friends/family/group something
Boredom — Or I am simply bored and chat/call
Information Sharing — Users share different information like Pictures, Videos, things they want to buy or order
Social Update — Users update their status to announce something or get socially validated
Payment — Users use UPI to transfer money

Ideas (Solving Problems):

Gaming: WhatsApp’s adoption is huge in India and other countries where the average age of the population is 28–29; WhatsApp can leverage this demographic by allowing them to engage by playing cash games. Simple games are easy to pass time for most of us and along with that if WhatsApp allows to challenge and win money they can tap a huge user segment.
Business: Small business don’t really use WhatsApp Business, they usually share they’re catalog images to their customers by WhatsApp and do the sales offline. Now if WhatsApp allows sharing of Product Catalog with ‘Buy’ option, businesses don’t need to rely on multiple platforms. The MVP can be simple as hooking content from some website and wrapping that content with WhatsApp’s actions of Payment by UPI.
Privacy: Privacy is a big issue. People get added without their consent on group chats and upon addition, the user’s phone number is exposed which leads to unwanted random messages from the strangers. A feature like allowing the user to opt-in/opt-out ‘Private Mode’ can help the users being invisible to the rest of the world other than their contacts.

I want to implement the Gaming feature because :

Everyone likes to play and the ability to earn money is luring
This market segment is growing exponentially
WhatsApp on a larger vision point of view will want to become a Super App (like WeChat), gaming is an important use case for that

Use Cases of Gaming feature:

Primary:

As a user, I should able to challenge my friend to play games which can be cash or casual
As a user, I should be able to challenge a group of friends

Secondary:

As a user, I should be able to set the winning amount of the game
As a user, I should be able to administer my created games
As a user, I should be able to set the entry amount

Feature Overview (About the idea):

School, College, and University Students usually use WhatsApp to communicate and I see WhatsApp can monetize this segment by offering them a way to express themselves also earn money along the way. This segment usually has a low attention span and try to chat/play to kill their boredom.

Giving these users an ability to play games and earn money by it is a good way to engage and monetize the users. The way the games will be monetized is that for each cash game, WhatsApp will take a platform fee (this can be as low as 1% in the beginning). For Example, I want to challenge my friend in a Tic Tac Toe game, if I win I get Rs 1, so the entry fee for me (and my friend) will be Rs ½ * 1.1 = Rs 0.55

To summarize:

WhatsApp will have an option to share/challenge a game with a friend. We can start with one game in the first phase and as simple as a tic tac toe can be launched
The user will be able to play for free or cash
Let’s have the cash set as Rs 1 winning in the first phase with platform fee set as 1% thereby, entry fee being Rs 0.55 for each player
The first user can challenge the second user, the second user needs to accept it within 5 hours, after which the game will expire and any entry fee deducted from the first user will be refunded back

Specs (Phase 1)

Pre-conditions -

User should be already registered on WhatsApp
User should be logged into the App
User should have proper network connectivity

Story -

As a user I should be able to challenge my friend for a tic tac toe game:

P0: User can play tic tac toe by tapping from the attachment option on a chat window of an existing user/new user or a group (Screen 1)
P0: Once the user taps on the attach option, user will get Tic Tac Toe along with the other options — Document, Camera, Gallery, Audio, Location and Contact (Screen 2)
P0: User on tapping ‘Tic Tac Toe’, the ‘Play Tic Tac Toe’ screen will open up with following option (Screen 3)
Game Title — User can set a name for the game (Optional), which will have a character limit of 20 characters and is optional. By default it will be take as ‘Tic Tac Toe’ if nothing is set
Cash Toggle — User can set it to cash, to play the cash game otherwise it will be free. Default selection will be ‘On’ (that is Cash)
Pay and Play — If it is set to Cash then this option will be visible. On tapping this user will be directed to pay the Rs 0.55 entry amount by the WhatsApp UPI and after successful payment the game will be embedded on the chat thread and the players can start playing (Screen 3)
Play Now — If cash is not set, user will have this option. On tapping this user’s game will be embedded on the chat thread and the players can start playing (Screen 4)
P0: Once the game is embedded on the chat thread, users (the initiator of the game and the other user(s)) in the chat thread can start playing the game (Screen 5)
The second player accepting the game will be able to play with the initiator and is called the challenger
The (challenger) player needs to tap on the ‘Play’ option on the embedded game to initiate the play
Once the (challenger) player tap’s on ‘Play’ user will be directed to the Play Tic Tac Toe screen as described in point 3, with Game Title and Cash Toggle disabled and as set by the initiator
Similarly, it will be Pay and Play/Play Now as set by the initiator with the same flows as described in point 3
The embedded game will have the status: ‘Start Game’ — when the initiator has not made the move, ‘Waiting’- when the challenger has not made the move
Turn state change will be as: Initiator → Challenger → Initiator → Challenger ….till has the 6 boxes are filled with each player’s turn with ‘tic’ and ‘cross’
The game will start with ‘Tic’ from the initiator and similarly, the challenger will ‘Cross’
P0: The game will expire in 5 hours if there is no challenger
P0: Once the game is completed it will show the status as
Draw: If there is no winner, both the users will see this
Winner: The winning user will see as a winner
Loser: The losing user will see as a loser
P0: In case of cash gaming, once the user has won the game, the winning amount of Rs 1 will be transferred to the user
As soon as the user wins, the winning user will get a push notification as — “<Username>, You have won! Rs 1 will be debited to your account.” and the losing user will get a notification as “<Username>, tough luck, but don’t lose hope! Keeping playing and keeping winning!”
The winning amount will be transferred by the UPI set by the user.
P0: If the users have not set the UPI, the system will ask to set the UPI at the time of ‘Pay and Play’