WhatsApp is bringing adverts to its immensely popular chat app.
The messaging service, which is used by 1.5 billion people worldwide every day, confirmed the dramatic shake-up in a blog post late on June 16. Adverts from businesses will appear in the Status feed, an ephemeral Snapchat Stories-like feature, and as promoted Channels.
The update means you'll encounter ads after scrolling through Status updates from your contacts, similar to how advertising works on Instagram Stories. You'll also see promoted Channels when browsing the directory, as businesses and creators pay to increase their visibility in your app.
Adverts will allow business and content creators to increase their rankings in the list of Channels available within your app. Ads will also play in between Stories, a feature that's already live in Instagram Stories
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Your personal conversations and Group Chats won't house adverts as part of this update, WhatsApp has confirmed. The advertisements will be limited to the Updates tab, which houses both Status and Channels features.
WhatsApp was acquired for $19 billion by Meta, the US firm shepherded by Mark Zuckerberg that also owns Instagram and Facebook, back in 2014. Since then, the social media behemoth has struggled to find a way to monetise this service.
WhatsApp co-founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum were vocal in their disdain for advertisements. The pair penned a blog post in June 2012 to explain the decision to charge users a subscription fee to access WhatsApp, a decision that Meta reversed after purchasing the business.
WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum holds a conference during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) tradeshow in Barcelona
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At the time of writing, this blog post — entitled "Why we don't sell ads" — is still live.
The brains behind WhatsApp explain: "Brian and I spent a combined 20 years at Yahoo!, working hard to keep the site working. And yes, working hard to sell ads, because that's what Yahoo! did. It gathered data and it served pages and it sold ads.
"These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads," the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs add. "When we sat down to start our own thing together three years ago we wanted to make something that wasn't just another ad clearinghouse. We wanted to spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and saved them money and made their lives better in a small way.
"We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads.
"No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn't). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake... and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement."
The blog post continues: "Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
"At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
"When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say 'Have you considered the alternative?'"
WhatsApp co-founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum penned a blog post about the need to charge a small subscription fee to use WhatsApp — a decision that was dropped by Meta after it acquired the messaging service for $19bn in 2014
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Brian Acton left WhatsApp in September 2017, after approximately eight years with the company, and just two under leadership at Meta. He went on to launch the encrypted nonprofit Signal Foundation, which runs a rival messaging service.
WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum announced his departure in mid-2018. His departure is believed to be the result of disputes with management over encryption and data sharing practices. After leaving the company, Koum told followers on X, then called Twitter, to "delete Facebook".
And now, seven years after the creators of WhatsApp left the service they built from the ground-up, Meta has decided to introduce adverts.
Meta assures you that your personal messages, calls and groups won't be used to determine which advertisements you see. The US company will use limited information — such as the country or city you're based in, language you're using, and Channels you already follow — to serve targeted ads.
If you've connected your WhatsApp account to Meta's Account Centre, the company will also use your ad preferences and information from across your Meta accounts. Your phone number won't be sold or shared with advertisers, Meta says. The messaging platform emphasises that your personal messages, calls and statuses remain end-to-end encrypted. This means nobody, including WhatsApp itself, can see or hear your private communications.
In a blog post about the shake-up, Meta stresses: "We will never sell or share your phone number to advertisers. Your personal messages, calls and groups you are in will not be used to determine the ads you may see."
WhatsApp has previously generated revenue through its WhatsApp Business platform and click-to-WhatsApp advertisements on other Meta properties. The company says subscription payments for exclusive Channel content will be processed through Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
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Alice Newton Rex, VP of product at WhatsApp, told TechCrunch that these the new features "felt like the next natural evolution" of the app's revenue streams, noting that businesses had been requesting more ways to reach customers directly within WhatsApp.
“[The new ads and promotion products] felt like the next natural evolution, now that both those businesses have scaled to help people discover businesses directly within WhatsApp. And that was what we were increasingly hearing from businesses that they wanted to do as well,” she said.
WhatsApp said adverts will be rolling out to users worldwide in the coming months.
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