<story><title>America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/09/business/america-online-to-buy-internet-chat-service-for-287-million.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>I assume the motivation for pulling this out of the archive is the WhatsApp purchase.  However, I don&amp;#x27;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alaskamiller</author><text>To contextualize requires relativity.&lt;p&gt;ICQ in 1999 had about 45 million users. There were only 248 million internet users back in 1999. That&amp;#x27;s 18% of mostly international users.&lt;p&gt;AOL was optimistic. So much so this is the actual response when they beat the street during their earning reports.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;(ICQ is) growing like a weed,&amp;quot; said AOL President Bob Pittman. &amp;quot;Monetizing it&amp;quot; will be &amp;quot;relatively easy,&amp;quot; he added.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;But then again, why does any of this matter?&lt;p&gt;Genie&amp;#x27;s out of the bottle. The game has changed. We&amp;#x27;re playing a game of scaling now. Less than a hundred dedicated folks can change the world.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;10593577</text></comment>
<story><title>America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/09/business/america-online-to-buy-internet-chat-service-for-287-million.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>I assume the motivation for pulling this out of the archive is the WhatsApp purchase.  However, I don&amp;#x27;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ama729</author><text>&amp;gt; WhatsApp is a real company with real monetization strategies.&lt;p&gt;Yes and no, they only got 20 millions in &lt;i&gt;revenue&lt;/i&gt; last year, not even profit:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;parmyolson&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;19&amp;#x2F;exclusive-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>