WhatsApp said Monday that users will start seeing ads in parts of the app, as owner Meta Platforms moves to cultivate a new revenue stream by tapping the billions of people that use the messaging service. <\/p>\n
Advertisements will be shown only in the app\u2019s Updates tab, which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day. However, they won\u2019t appear where personal chats are located, developers said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe personal messaging experience on WhatsApp isn\u2019t changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads,\u201d WhatsApp said in a blog post. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s a big change for the company, whose founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton vowed to keep the platform free of ads when they created it in 2009. <\/p>\n
Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014 and the pair left a few years later. Parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has long been trying to generate revenue from WhatsApp. <\/p>\n
WhatsApp said ads will be targeted to users based on information like their age, the country or city where they\u2019re located, the language they\u2019re using, the channels they\u2019re following in the app, and how they\u2019re interacting with the ads they see. <\/p>\n
WhatsApp said it won\u2019t use personal messages, calls and groups that a user is a member of to target ads to the user. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of three advertising features that WhatsApp unveiled on Monday as it tries to monetize the app\u2019s user base. Channels will also be able to charge users a monthly fee for subscriptions so they can get exclusive updates. And business owners will be able to pay to promote their channel\u2019s visibility to new users. <\/p>\n
Most of Meta\u2019s revenue comes from ads. In 2025, the Menlo Park, California-based company\u2019s revenue totaled $164.5 billion and $160.6 billion of it came from advertising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WhatsApp said Monday that users will start seeing ads in parts of the app, as owner Meta Platforms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3159],"tags":[78354,51,4180,557,78353,4179,4178,56470,547,7154,53,7143,16,15,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-191288","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-brian-acton","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-ca-state-wire","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-email-and-messaging","13":"tag-general-news","14":"tag-inc","15":"tag-meta-platforms","16":"tag-mobile","17":"tag-software","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-u-s-news","20":"tag-uk","21":"tag-united-kingdom","22":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114697934167927845","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}