WhatsApp To Show Ads, Offer Paid Subscriptions

Meta will begin showing ads inside of its WhatsApp messaging service, opening a new potential revenue stream while the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence and other long-term projects.

The ads will appear in WhatsApp’s “Updates” tab, a section of the app that’s separate from a user’s inbox and private conversations. The tab gets 1.5 billion visitors per day, Meta said Monday. That tab is home to Status, WhatsApp’s version of disappearing Stories, which will now carry ads.

Advertisers can also pay to promote their WhatsApp Channel and give it prominent placement within the Updates tab. Channels allow brands or celebrities to post to a group of followers, like a giant email blast.

As part of the advertising push, WhatsApp will also let Channel operators sell subscriptions, meaning they can create special messages just for a group of paying customers. Meta won’t take a cut of any subscriptions sold through the app at launch, but eventually plans to charge 10% of sales, Alice Newton Rex, vice president of product at WhatsApp, said in an interview.

Meta has been spending aggressively this year on AI, including to improve the large language models that underpin generative AI features in its products. The company also just agreed to invest $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, an AI data labeling startup, according to a person familiar with the deal. The expense has added pressure on Meta’s main advertising business to continue growing to support the expanding AI effort.

The company has spent years slowly developing a business to accompany the private messaging service acquired for $19 billion in 2014. Advertising has never been considered a great fit given the intimacy of a private messaging inbox. Meta instead built WhatsApp to cater to small businesses, including efforts to build out digital payments and shopping features. Those services have been targeted especially in countries outside the US, such as India and Brazil, where the WhatsApp is the dominant messaging app.

While payments, in particular, has been a slow moving effort given various regulatory concerns, Meta makes billions of dollars each year selling click-to-message ads on Instagram and Facebook that send users to a WhatsApp chat conversation with the advertiser. It also allows businesses to pay to reach customers on the app who have opted to receive their direct messages.

Part of Meta’s challenge historically has been balancing the desire to generate revenue with a desire to give WhatsApp users privacy. Meta’s other advertising products are hyper-targeted and often rely on a user’s personal information or browsing history. WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, and user privacy was a major promise from co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who pledged they would never sell ads inside WhatsApp. They left Meta in 2018 and 2017, respectively.

WhatsApp ads will use broad, general targeting like a user’s location, language preferences, and Channels that they follow, Newton Rex said. Meta won’t take a person’s Facebook or Instagram information to target them with ads on WhatsApp unless they’ve explicitly linked their accounts, she added.

“We’re not going to interrupt people’s personal messages with ads,” Newton Rex said. “If you just want to carry on using WhatsApp for messaging and calling then you’ll never see them at all.”

WhatsApp will begin a global rollout of ads beginning Monday, but it will take time for all users to start seeing them, she added.