Hate Ads? WhatsApp Status to Soon Start Showing Them

In what could be the biggest change to the world’s popular chat app, WhatsApp has begun testing advertisements in Status updates. The new experiment is part of Meta’s plan to monetise the app that has over 3 billion monthly active users (MAUs) globally. Apart from ads, WhatsApp has also started testing subscriptions for channels — a new way for creators to earn direct money.

“More than 1.5 billion people visit the Updates tab on WhatsApp daily,” said Zuckerberg, adding that the upcoming tools — ads and subscriptions — will “give people and businesses more ways to connect on WhatsApp that are separate from your personal chats.”

A major but imminent change

For years, WhatsApp has been anticipated to introduce monetisation on its platform. While Meta repeatedly refuted those reports, it said it was open to exploring ways to expand its revenue streams. It makes sense for the company to monetise different feasible functionalities in the world’s most popular chat app. However, at the same time, Meta likely looked for ways that would respect the app’s privacy-centric stance and end-to-end encryption. Serving ads in chats could have gone against that, but advertisements in Status updates seem like a harmless strategy.

So if you start seeing advertisements while checking the Status updates from your contacts, do not be surprised. Currently in the testing phase, the frequency of ads in Status may be less, but the company may open the floodgates for advertisers once testing is over. The ads in WhatsApp may be similar to those you see when checking back-to-back Instagram Stories. Tapping a Story with ad takes you to the landing page of the product or service being advertised. Although WhatsApp has not said how it will implement advertisements.

But rest assured, your chat data will not be used for curating these ads. “Your personal messages will continue to be encrypted and won’t be used to personalise these,” said Zuckerberg.

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