I guess this is an old discussion, but WhatsApp seriously threatened the dominion of Facebook, a company that is valued at $209B simply for owning a significant

I guess this is an old discussion, but WhatsApp seriously threatened the dominion of Facebook, a company that is valued at $209B simply for owning a significant amount of the daily attention span of consumers world-wide. Essentially, the value of WhatsApp is based more on what it could have destroyed than on what it could have created. Advertising is kind of funny like that, since it's not a product that consumers actually want. No value is lost to consumers by switching to a platform without advertising, even though the economic damage to advertisers can be huge.