Signal may become the latest social media app offering paid for services after its new president, Meredith Whittaker, all but said so.
Whittaker had been appointed to the newly created role on Monday by the company’s board. Meanwhile, it is still yet to named a CEO that would fill the role vacated by founder Moxie Marlinspike.
Part of the new president’s job appears to be to find a way of ensuring financial sustainability, according to her blog post. And since Signal does not want to go the way of other big techs, which is using your data to offer ad services to businesses, it makes sense that it could start considering monetising users directly.
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“It costs tens of millions of dollars per year to develop and maintain an app like Signal. The more people who use Signal, the more people we can talk to on Signal, that’s more people whose communication is private and encrypted,” Whittaker argued as the reason why the company needs money.
Even ad giants like Twitter and Snapchat have already announced premium services as Twitter Blue and Snapchat Premium, respectively. Facebook also recently hinted that it was looking at something along those lines too.
Meredith Whittaker should know the dangers of using chat platforms without end-to-end encryption. She had worked for Google for 13 years and has been a critic of AI products due to their potential to cause harm.
For now, users who can afford to, can send donations to Signal in-app. But, depending on ‘goodwill’ may not be the best strategy for a business in such competitive industry.
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