As Meta Platforms moves to cultivate a new revenue stream by tapping the billions of people who use the messaging service, WhatsApp said that users will start seeing ads in parts of the app.
While disclosing this on Monday, WhatsApp said advertisements will be shown only in the app’s Updates tab, which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day.
The developers, however, said the ads will not appear where personal chats are located.
“The personal messaging experience on WhatsApp isn’t changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads,” WhatsApp said in a blog post.
According to reports, this is 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.
Recall that 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.
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WhatsApp said ads will be targeted to users based on information like their age, the country or city where they’re located, the language they’re using, the channels they’re following in the app, and how they’re interacting with the ads they see.
WhatsApp added that it will not use personal messages, calls and groups that a user is a member of to target ads to the user.
It was also gathered that this is one of three advertising features that WhatsApp unveiled on Monday as it tries to monetise the app’s user base.
In addition, 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’s visibility to new users.
Meanwhile, most of Meta’s revenue comes from ads. In 2025, the Menlo Park, California-based company’s revenue totalled US$164.5 billion and US$160.6 billion of it came from advertising.
