17 June 2025 : For a communications platform that is by far the most popular worldwide with an estimated 1.5 billion daily active users, Meta is finally leveraging WhatsApp to deliver ads, and a monetisation route via subscriptions as well as channel promotions for businesses. This perhaps is the complete transformation of WhatsApp, considering the app’s founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton really didn’t like advertisements.
So much so, Koum in his first tweet posted in 2011, wrote, “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy s**t we don’t need.” It was in 2014 when Meta, then Facebook, acquired the messaging platform for close to $19 million, with the payment structure involving $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook share, and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees, vesting over four years.
Nevertheless, the latest chapter in WhatsApp’s evolution now gives Channels the option to put certain content behind a subscription wall, which will be a monthly fee. Channel admins also get new tools to promote their presence on the platform, also for a fee. “We’ll help you discover new channels that might be interesting to you when you’re looking through the directory. For the first time, admins have a way to increase their Channel’s visibility,” the company says, in a statement.
And of course, there will be ads in Status. “You’ll be able to find a new business and easily start a conversation with them about a product or service they’re promoting in Status,” Meta says.
Status and Channels sit within WhatsApp in the ‘Updates’ tab. Status are usually visual updates posted by your connections who are on WhatsApp, while Channels are similar propositions but run by businesses — such as the channels for Mark Zuckerberg, Liverpool Football Club and WhatsApp itself, to name a few. In the Updates tab, users can also find more channels to follow. It is largely the Updates tab that will host Meta’s WhatsApp monetisation efforts, at least for now.
The company insists none of the monetisation efforts spill over into messages and group chats. “These new features will appear only on the Updates tab, away from your personal chats. This means if you only use WhatsApp to chat with friends and loved ones there is no change to your experience at all,” they say. As with all things Meta, and indeed big tech, could we caveat this also with — ‘at least for now’?
There is insistence that nothing changes as far as the end-to-end encryption for messages, calls and Status updates. Meta says that it will customise the ads that a user sees in Status or Channels, using “limited info” such as the country or city location, language, the Channels a user may be following. There is, of course, an element of how a user interacts with the ads they have previously seen.
“For people that have chosen to add WhatsApp to Accounts Center, we’ll also use your ad preferences and info from across your Meta accounts,” they add.
Meta insists there is no intention to sell personal user information, such as the WhatsApp registered phone number to advertisers, while personal messages, calls and groups, will not be used to determine the ads a user may see.
It has not been a smooth road for Meta (and Facebook) to navigate over the years, and that is what defines this timing. Meta has considered bringing some level of ads for years to WhatsApp, but had to reverse plans in 2020, though WhatsApp head Will Cathcart had confirmed in 2023 that things were still in consideration.
Last year alone (calendar year 2024), Meta made more than $160 billion in ad revenue across its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram — a significant increase from $132 billion in 2023. Meta, understandably so, wants to leverage this momentum as best they can. We will get a fair understanding of how Meta’s WhatsApp monetisation efforts pan out, when the tech giant shares the latest financials early next year.
Summary:
Meta plans to introduce ads on WhatsApp to boost revenue, marking a major shift in the platform’s monetisation strategy after years of ad-free service.