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For the more than 11 years since Meta acquired WhatsApp, the messaging app remained an outlier in the company’s portfolio for one major reason: it wasn’t an ad-supported platform. As recently as 2023, Meta had denied any considerations of integrating ads into the platform. It was in keeping with a mantra developed by WhatsApp’s co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, which read, “No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”
That all changed on Monday when Meta announced at Cannes Lions that it would, in the next few months, begin introducing ads in the WhatsApp Updates tab, which hosts the app’s Channels and Status features and sees more than 1.5 billion daily users.
Ads in Status, Meta wrote in its announcement, will allow users to find businesses and “start a conversation with them about a product or service they’re promoting.”
That’s not all: Meta also said it would roll out a paid subscription model to WhatsApp Channels that want to offer subscriber-only updates for a fee, similar to YouTube and Twitch, as well as Promoted Channels, which will recommend Channels to users in the app’s Channel directory.
Private practice? WhatsApp, which has more than 3 billion monthly active users worldwide, has historically been advertised as a place to send private, encrypted messages. After the announcement, Meta seemed focused on getting ahead of any concerns users might have about how ads could change that. Nicola Mendelsohn, head of the global business group at Meta, wrote in a post on LinkedIn that WhatsApp ads “won’t disrupt people’s messaging or change the privacy of messages with friends and family.”
WhatsApp has been running its biggest-ever campaign since May called “Not Even WhatsApp,” which assures viewers that no one can read encrypted messages on the app outside of senders and recipients. As part of the campaign, Meta installed OOH “privacy mirrors” in New York, London, Delhi, and São Paulo last week.
Over the years, WhatsApp has faced multiple rounds of backlash over privacy concerns. Earlier this year, its Meta AI integrations sparked outcry from some users worried about data-scraping; soon after that, WhatsApp introduced an Advanced Chat Privacy feature, which it says blocks chat participants from “exporting chats, auto-downloading media to their phone, and using messages for AI features.” WhatsApp also faced criticism in 2021 for a privacy policy update that many believed allowed for personal data sharing with Facebook. WhatsApp postponed but ultimately followed through on the update, which was accompanied by an international, privacy-focused ad campaign.
A little data, as a treat: As part of today’s announcement, Meta stated in a blog post on its website that personal messages, calls, and statuses will remain end-to-end encrypted, and the company will only use “limited info” to target ads, like “country or city, language, the Channels you’re following, and how you interact with the ads you see.”
When Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, Koum wrote in a blog post that WhatsApp was built “around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible” and assured users that “if partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.”
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