After seven years since its initial announcement, Meta has finally started rolling out advertisements on WhatsApp, visible exclusively within the “Updates” tab. The company assures users who primarily use the app for personal chats with family and friends that their experience will remain unchanged. This also applies to two other new features: channel subscriptions and promoted channels.
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“We’ve been talking about our plans to build a business that does not interrupt your personal chats for years and we believe the Updates tab is the right place for these new features to work,” a company blog post stated.
WhatsApp users will now have the ability to chat directly with businesses advertising products or services via the Status tab. Meta has outlined its approach to ad targeting, confirming it will use certain user data, including your device’s language, country or city, channels you follow, and your interaction with ads. If you’ve linked your WhatsApp to Meta’s Accounts Center, your ad preferences and information from across your other Meta accounts will also be utilized.
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Crucially, Meta emphasizes that it will not sell or share your phone number with marketers. Furthermore, your personal chats, calls, and status updates will remain end-to-end encrypted and will not be used for ad targeting.
The “Updates” tab, previously known as the “Status” tab, represents valuable screen real estate for Meta, with over 1.5 billion people using it daily. Given that advertising remains Meta’s primary revenue source, the introduction of ads to WhatsApp was largely anticipated, with the only real surprise being the time it took to implement. This move provides Meta with additional revenue streams, which could help support other long-term, potentially less profitable ventures within the company.
