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That doesn't scale nearly to the $20 billion they were bought at. Yelp, which has a similar business model to what you quoted, and is more essential to businesses than WhatsApp, only has a market cap of $3.6 billion.

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I'm not sure you understand how popular Whatsapp is outside the US. No one in my country has heard of Yelp (201 million population). Everyone uses Whatsapp daily. Whatsapp has 1.5 billion active users.

Part of the problem is that such customers are not as valuable as U.S. customers :(

You see it on the ads side as well, ads to U.S. or European customers can pay 10 times as much as an ad to a Latin American.

Yeah, but if we're going by a business features monetization model, what would matter is the number of businesses that are signed up, not the number of users.

I agree. My point is that a large number of businesses are likely to sign up because the service has a large number of users.

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