Thought Leadership
The chat service WhatsApp introduces advertisements in the “News” section.
There, users can publish images and videos as status messages for their contacts for 24 hours. WhatsApp also emphasizes that personal conversations, calls and status messages are still protected with end-to-end encryption – and are therefore only visible to the respective users.
Other data will be used to personalize advertising: Which country and city the users are in, which language their devices are set to – and, over time, which ads they have already interacted with on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp has been owned by the Facebook group Meta for more than a decade. Users can therefore also link their accounts with various services such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in an “account overview”. If you do this, advertising preferences from the other apps are also used to personalize WhatsApp ads.
Introduction over several months
To be able to place advertisements in the app, a company must have a presence on WhatsApp. Meta manager Nikila Srinivasan said that they will initially start with a small number of partners. It is also unclear how quickly the advertising will reach Germany – WhatsApp wants to introduce it worldwide “over the next few months”.
In the “News” section, users will also see so-called channels in which they can follow posts from providers. In future, channel operators will also be able to sell paid subscriptions. It will also be possible to make the channels more visible as advertisements in the section.
Ads for 1.5 billion users
According to Meta, WhatsApp has three billion monthly active users, with 1.5 billion accessing the “News” section every day.
Before the takeover, founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton promised to operate WhatsApp with an annual fee of one dollar or euro without advertising. The Facebook group bought the app in 2014 for around 22 billion dollars and initially did not try to make money from it for a long time. However, US competition regulators criticized Facebook for eliminating a competitor with the takeover and are seeking to have WhatsApp spun off in court. Co-founder Acton now supports the competitor service Signal.
dpa
