This week, WhatsApp did something its founders said it would never do: it’s putting advertisements inside the app. It ends WhatsApp’s decade-plus run of offering an ad-free messaging and calling experience.
Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, attempted to justify the decision by saying ads will be sequestered to its “Update” tab, where you’ll see some sponsored status updates. WhatsApp’s status feature allows users to share photos, videos, and text messages that disappear after 24 hours — but now you’ll see ones from businesses, too. “If you only use WhatsApp to chat with friends and loved ones there is no change to your experience at all,” Meta writes in its announcement.
But the rollout of ads in its status feature could be just the beginning for Meta, which raked in more than $160 billion in ad revenue from across Facebook and Instagram in 2024. Meta says its ads are built with “privacy in mind” and won’t draw from your personal messages, calls, and statuses, which will remain encrypted. Instead, WhatsApp is limiting ad targeting to elements like your city, country, language, the channels you’re following, and the way you interact with the ads. Still, bringing targeted ads to the platform at all is at odds with its identity as a “secure” messaging app — a principle its founders aimed to uphold.
WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton have made their stance on advertising very clear. “Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product,” a 2012 WhatsApp blog post reads. Koum also kept a note from Acton taped to his desk that read, “No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!” as a reminder of what kind of app they should be building.
Just two years following Meta’s acquisition of WhatsApp, the app transitioned from charging 99 cents per year to a completely free model. At the time, WhatsApp said it would still offer an experience “without third-party ads and spam.”
Behind the scenes, Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s continued push for targeted advertising drove Koum and Acton out of the company. “Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy,” Acton said during a 2018 interview with Forbes in which he explained his departure. In the years since, Meta has waffled on bringing ads to WhatsApp. It pulled the plug on its idea in 2020 but later brought up the possibility in 2023 before rolling ads out to users now. WhatsApp is also rolling out the ability to subscribe to channels, and for businesses to pay for top spots on its “Explore” page for channels.
The reality is, Meta’s businesses are built on advertising. It couldn’t help but launch ads on Threads earlier this year, and is planning to launch AI ad tools to help companies make more ads. Meta also brought its AI chatbot to WhatsApp, where users can interact with the bot in group messages, ask questions, and generate images. The company says it can read messages that “mention @Meta AI, or that people choose to share with Meta AI,” raising privacy concerns that WhatsApp aims to fix with private AI chats.
“This is another betrayal of the privacy protections that once distinguished WhatsApp.”
Launching targeted advertising only adds to these concerns. “This is another betrayal of the privacy protections that once distinguished WhatsApp and attracted many of its users to the platform,” John Davisson, the director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), says in a statement to The Verge. “Meta has taken a service that promised no ads and minimal data collection and warped it into one more tentacle of its surveillance advertising empire.”
Many aren’t happy about the addition of ads, with some users on Reddit saying that they plan to switch to Signal’s ad-free app due to the change. “Friendly reminder to people. Signal is a superior product built for good,” one user writes. Another comment, upvoted more than 3,500 times, says: “The moral of the story: Never trust the Zuck. Meta/Facebook promised to never add advertising to WhatsApp when they acquired the app for $19bln.” There are still some users indifferent to the change because it affects a tab they use less frequently.
“The online advertising ecosystem has been shown time and again to fuel widespread privacy and security violations,” Bill Budington, the senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells The Verge. “While it is not a surprising move for Meta, it is putting WhatsApp’s 3 billion users at unnecessary risk, all for the sake of a monetization strategy no one asked for and no one wanted.”
Source: The Verge
