Author: Edouard Chazal

Why WhatsApp Doesn’t Sell Ads

Back on June 18, 2012, WhatsApp’ founders/PR/younameit wrote this brillant statement about “Why [WhatsApp] [doesn’t] sell ads.”
Today, WhatsApp sold itself to one of the world’s largest advertiser.

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

→ WhatsApp Blog

The Science of Marginal Gains

Most people love to talk about success (and life in general) as an event. We talk about losing 50 pounds or building a successful business or winning the Tour de France as if they are events. But the truth is that most of the significant things in life aren’t stand-alone events, but rather the sum of all the moments when we chose to do things 1 percent better or 1 percent worse. Aggregating these marginal gains makes a difference.

→ Buffer

For the Love of Art, and Money

The latest auctions here demonstrated how buyers have now split into two main groups: Longer-term investors who hold to more traditional notions of collecting and who tend to focus on Impressionist, modern and classic contemporary works; and short-term speculators, known as “flippers,” who busy themselves with cut-and-run deals in the red-hot market for emerging artists.

→ The New York Times

Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl ?

The boy’s coaches, and later his parents, ran onto the field. Smelling salts wouldn’t revive him. Eventually, an ambulance appeared. Sean was convinced that he’d killed the boy. He began to cry. But what Sean remembers most vividly was the way, right after the tackle, his teammates kept slapping his helmet, as if he’d just done the most heroic thing ever, which, in a purely football sense, he had.

→ The New York Times