Umm, WhatsApp might not be popular in the US but it's massively popular in India, Brazil and many other countries. IIRC they crossed 1B users a few months ago, and continue to grow. At acquisition, they were at 400M.
If you look at how messaging has become the primary monetization platform in China, I would argue that WhatsApp is much more critical to Facebook's long term success globally than Instagram.
And the MO seems the same from my outsider perspective - they were mostly left alone till very recently.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good call for FB to buy WhatsApp from a business perspective, but I am thinking that had they left it alone, as in, not screwed around with it, it would have kept growing just as well, maybe even more so than it now that a share of people stopped trusting it as much.
If you look at how messaging has become the primary monetization platform in China, I would argue that WhatsApp is much more critical to Facebook's long term success globally than Instagram.
And the MO seems the same from my outsider perspective - they were mostly left alone till very recently.