London (United Kingdom), June 16 (LaPresse) – WhatsApp announced today that users will begin seeing advertisements in certain parts of the app, in a move by parent company Meta aimed at further monetizing the billions of people using the messaging service. Ads will only appear in the 'Updates' tab of the app, which is used daily by 1.5 billion people. However, developers have stated that they will not appear in private chats.
“The personal messaging experience on WhatsApp is not changing, and personal messages, calls, and status updates are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to display ads,” WhatsApp said in a blog post.
This marks a major shift for the company, whose founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton had vowed to keep the platform ad-free when it was created in 2009. Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, and the two founders left the company a few years later. Meta has long been seeking ways to generate revenue from WhatsApp.