When Meta bought WhatsApp back in 2014, there were widespread predictions that the company, then known as Facebook, would start selling ads.
It has taken 11 years, but it seems that the doomsayers have finally been proven right. Sort of.
From this week, WhatsApp users will start to see advertising in the app, but not inside their private chats. Instead, Meta is concentrating on the Updates tab – the tab you accidentally click on once in a blue moon, where all those channels you signed up to in a fit of enthusiasm months ago are gradually building up unread updates.
[ Meta introduces advertising to WhatsApp in push for new revenuesOpens in new window ]
There are a couple of ways that Meta is finally making advert money from the app. First, there are the subscriptions, where users can pay a fee for exclusive content in channels.
Business can also pay Meta a fee to promote their channels or buy adverts in the Status section, potentially hitting up to 1.5 billion pairs of eyeballs. Assuming that people are paying attention, of course.
This is not the first time that Meta has put out the idea of adverts in WhatsApp. Back in 2020, the company was said to have plans to integrate advertising into the Status feature. However, it dropped the plans and disbanded the team that had been working on it. Only weeks later, a global pandemic shut down business activity across the world. Meta must have been kicking itself for letting a captive audience slide away unmonetised at a time when everyone was glued to their screens because there was little else to keep them entertained.
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The fact that WhatsApp has managed to get to this point without some form of advertising shoehorned in there is probably more notable.
Its founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, once proclaimed they would never sell advertising and Koum reportedly kept a note from Acton that proclaimed, “No ads, no games, no gimmicks”. A decade is a long time in the tech world, though, and given that they both exited the company by 2018, that promise couldn’t have been relied on. As soon as they sold the company to Meta, its days were numbered.
But encryption and targeted advertising are not easy bedfellows, posing a real challenge for Meta in how it could make money from the app without the usual flow of data it requires. For now, it is using basic data – country of location, language and so on. It is more complex if users have linked their WhatsApp to other Meta platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram.
The real question is: what comes next?
