WhatsApp introducing advertising is a potentially lucrative but risky move – Yahoo Finance

Janina Steinmetz, Professor in Marketing, Bayes Business School, City St George’s, University of London and Yusuf Oc, Associate Professor of Digital Marketing and AI, City St George’s, University of London Fri, 20 Jun 2025, 1:34 pm 4 min read shutterstock metamorworks/Shutterstock The decision to start advertising on WhatsApp marks a major shift for a private messaging service that has long positioned itself as being different from other social media platforms. Back when Meta (then known simply as Facebook) bought it in 2014 for US$19 billion, WhatsApp had an unusual and simple business model. Users were required to pay a very small annual fee (US$1 (£0.69)) in return for a minimalist, ad-free experience. That fee was scrapped in 2016, and WhatsApp became fully free. But it always had the potential to eventually align with Meta’s wider operation of offering free services for users to connect to others – while making money from targeted advertising. Since then, WhatsApp has taken slow, deliberate steps toward making money. These strategies relied on income from businesses, which paid to use WhatsApp as a way of communicating with their customers. By 2024, over 700 million businesses were using a separate version of the app called WhatsApp
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