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Advertisements will be shown only in the app's Updates tab,
which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day.
However, they won't appear where personal chats are located,
developers said.
“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.
It’s 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.
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.
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 said it won't use personal messages, calls and groups
that a user is a member of to target ads to the user.
It's one of three advertising features that WhatsApp unveiled on
Monday as it tries to monetize the app's user base. 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.
Most of Meta's revenue comes from ads. In 2025, the Menlo Park,
California-based company's revenue totaled $164.5 billion and
$160.6 billion of it came from advertising.
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