On Monday, WhatsApp announced that users will soon begin seeing adverts in certain areas of the app as its owner, Meta Platforms, attempts to find a new revenue stream for the messaging service’s billions of users.
Only the Updates tab will have ads utilised by up to 1.5 billion people daily. Nevertheless, as developers say, they will not be introduced to personal chat zones.
According to a blog post by WhatsApp, the company said, “WhatsApp’s personal messaging service will remain the same. Personal messages, calls, and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to deliver advertisements.”
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This is a big shift in the company, whose founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, promised to remain ad-free when they launched it in 2009.
In 2014, Facebook obtained WhatsApp, and the two men departed in a few years. The mother company, Meta Platforms Inc., has been attempting to monetise WhatsApp long enough.
WhatsApp claimed that advertisements will be targeted to its users based on details like their age, nation or city of residence, language, which channels they follow in the app, and the way they interact with the advertisements they observe.
The WhatsApp assured that it will not target advertising based on personal messages being exchanged, personal calls, and personal groups one has. It is among three advertisement options that WhatsApp rolled out on Monday in an effort to monetise its app users. There will also be the ability for channels to charge the user of the channel a monthly subscription fee to obtain premium updates of the channel. Also, the owners can pay to advertise their business channel to new users.
Meta’s largest proportion of income has come from advertisements. In 2025, the revenue of the Menlo Park-based company in California was 164.5 billion, of which 160.6 billion was attributed to advertising.
