After many years of providing free services without any explanation, WhatsApp will now start displaying ads on the popular chat app. To be clear, users will only see ads on the status screen, which is similar to Instagram Stories.
Just as you see ads after watching a few stories on Instagram, you will see ads on WhatsApp after scrolling through a few status updates.
The company said that its advertising engine uses signals such as the user’s country or city, language, the channels they are watching, and data from the ads that users interact with.
Meta stated that it does not use personal data such as phone numbers, messages, calls, and user groups to display targeted ads. If a user has added their WhatsApp account to Meta’s Account Center, the company will use their account settings to serve ads.
The company said it is allowing businesses and users to promote their Channels, WhatsApp’s broadcasting feature, in the Discover section, and that it will allow individual creators and businesses to charge users a subscription fee to unlock exclusive updates on Channels. The company said that these subscription payments will be made through the app stores.
Meta said that more than 1.5 billion people use Status and Channels every day.
Until now, WhatsApp has been generating revenue from its WhatsApp Business platform and advertising on WhatsApp. Meta has repeatedly mentioned these as growing revenue channels in its recent quarterly earnings reports.
Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp’s vice president of product, said in a briefing that advertising is a worthy expansion of the app’s revenue streams.
“[New advertising and promotional products] seemed like the next natural evolution, now that both of these businesses have scaled to help people find businesses directly on WhatsApp. And that’s what we’ve been hearing more and more from companies that would like to do the same,” she said.
WhatsApp said the ads and these features will be rolled out globally in the coming months.
