Chris Daniels, vice president of WhatsApp, has confirmed reports announcing the early arrival of advertising to this popular instant messaging application. According to the official, status bar in WhatsApp would show ads starting with 2019.
“We’re going to put ads in the ‘status’ bar. That will be the primary monetization model for the company, as well as an opportunity for other companies to reach the people on WhatsApp,” the executive told reporters during an event in India.
Chris Daniels did not specify the date of this new arrival, deemed as an unpleasant novelty by many users, but reports indicate that it would be introduced early next year. It is not known how advertising will work within the most popular instant messaging application, in what form the ads would appear and whether they would be shown to users at random or it will be ‘targeted advertising.’
WhatsApp to show ads in the ‘status’ bar starting with 2019
The monetization of WhatsApp contradicts the intentions of the app’s founders who, in 2014, sold the WhatsApp concept to Facebook. At the end of September, one of the founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton, explained in an interview with Forbes that he left the partnership with Facebook partly because he did not agree with Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to monetize WhatsApp.
As Brian Acton said, Facebook wanted to introduce targeted ads in the ‘status’ bar of WhatsApp, so Acton admitted he felt that the ads would break a social pact WhatsApp ‘signed’ with its users.
“Targeted advertising is something that’s not making me happy,” Acton said in an interview ack then. Another co-founder of the most popular instant messaging app, Jan Koum, also decided to leave WhatsApp last April, arguing that he also had differences with Facebook’s leadership.
In conclusion, in early-2019, WhatsApp will start showing ads (possibly targeted ads) in the application’s ‘status’ section, a movement already deemed as unpleasant by many of the app’s users.
