$500M/yr in raw revenue? How do you grow from there? Lower costs? Grow your revenue? Half a billion is getting close to max adoption. Do you up your prices?
Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned Whatsapp have $58M of funding, so I doubt it - that'd probably be seen as a huge failure..somewhat amusingly. Let's say them investors want their 10X within a few years so you need to pay them over a year's revenue over a few years with no real growth there - you're paying a lot and they'd probably not agree.
Possibly upsell to some premium set of services, or branch out into other business lines. E.g., Amazon's not just a bookstore any more.
Simple phone messaging, not likely.
But where does phone messaging lead to?
• Other comms services (voice, voicemail, teleconference, video). There's room for improvement in all of these. Look at the one stand-out from G+: Hangouts.
• Sales or transactions. From text messaging to commerce-via-text is a step. Or banking. Both are directly monetized.
• Some level of community-based information service with a commercial component. I've long wondered why more of the social networks haven't gone here.
What's to stop a free alternative like Telegram taking all the market? Smartphone adoption is still happening here, and I use the rates are much lower in developing countries. Once word gets around maybe everyone will switch.
The key though is that Telegram actually isn't free to consumers when compared to Whatsapp. At $1/year + access to everyone who is already on network vs. $0/year + access to smaller network+need to invite your friends to build that network Whatsapp is actually (significantly) cheaper. If it was more expensive per year I think they'd be giving some room, but no one is even going to notice getting billed.
I don't think they're close to adoption. There are 7Bn phones in the world and growing. Granted a chunk are corporate which won't ever need WhatsApp, but most in third world countries still use burners.
And although there is likely a slow take up by the elderly, the next generation are all new customers. The 1/5th smartphone ratio can only go up. (This POV is of course assuming WhatsApp wins the messaging war, which is what FB is betting on)
