Whatsapp

Will WhatsApp, a bastion of private messaging, succumb to the era of intrusive ads or will it offer an unexpected salvation to its loyal users? WhatsApp, this pillar of our daily exchanges, finds itself at a decisive crossroads. Between intimate conversations and work groups, will its serene space resist the call of advertising sirens? Or, in a twist that few would have seen coming, will it reinvent itself, preserving this digital haven of peace for its millions of followers? The balance tips, and the outcome could well surprise more than one loyal user. WhatsApp welcomes ads: an announcement causing a stir The Meta group recently confirmed: WhatsApp, one of the most popular messaging applications in the world, will now display ads. This choice marks a turning point for a platform long synonymous with simplicity and intrusion-free exchanges. But one question remains on everyone’s lips: how will this impact the user experience and our private conversations? Privacy respect: how Meta is approaching it Facing concerns about privacy, Meta assures that conversations will remain intact and protected by end-to-end encryption. Ads will not be based on direct access to exchanged messages. Instead, the algorithm will use general data, such as the history

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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Ben McPoland Thu, 19 Jun 2025, 0:10 am 3 min read In this article: For whatever reason, I’ve never owned shares of Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) in my Stocks and Shares ISA. They’re up 750% in a decade, so this has been a massive missed opportunity. Meta used to be known as Facebook, of course, and also owns Instagram. These two platforms are the advertisement cash cows, but it hasn’t done anything revolutionary with WhatsApp since it bought the messaging app 11 years ago. That might be about to change, though. On 16 June, Meta announced that ads will finally be coming to the world’s most popular messaging app, which now has roughly 3bn monthly users. The potential monetisation opportunity could be enormous. Given this, should I rush out to buy Meta stock right now? Here’s my take. To be fair, I was already bullish on the stock before this announcement. The amount of customer data the firm has is mind-boggling, and this gives it a massive advantage in the age of AI. It can use the technology to both improve targeted ads and boost user engagement. Just last week, in fact, a friend told me how scarily good Instagram’s

(AP) - Iranian state television on Tuesday afternoon urged people to remove WhatsApp from their smartphones, alleging without specific evidence that the messaging app gathered user information to send to Israel. In a statement, WhatsApp said it was “concerned these false reports will be an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need them the most.” WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, meaning a service provider in the middle can’t read a message. “We do not track your precise location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the personal messages people are sending one another,” it added. “We do not provide bulk information to any government.” End-to-end encryption means that messages are scrambled so that only the sender and recipient can see them. If anyone else intercepts the message, all they will see is a garble that can’t be unscrambled without the key. Gregory Falco, an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University and cybersecurity expert, said it’s been demonstrated that it’s possible to understand metadata about WhatsApp that does not get encrypted. “So you can understand things about how people are using the app and that’s been a consistent

In Meta’s family of apps, which together shape the everyday internet use of billions of users around the world, WhatsApp has always been the exception. While Facebook and Instagram are full of personalized advertisements, the messenger app Mark Zuckerberg acquired in 2014 remained ad-free. That has now changed for certain elements of the app. The WhatsApp home screen, where the chats are listed, will remain untouched, as will the private and group chats. They will also continue to be end-to-end encrypted. But ads will soon begin appearing in the "Updates” tab. According to Meta, the tab is used by 1.5 billion users There will be two kinds of ads: In the Updates section (German: "Aktuelles"), personalized ads, customized for the user’s profile, will appear among the status updates of friends and contacts. In the Channels section (German: "Kanäle), creators and companies will be able to promote their own channels for a fee. Those ads will appear in the channel directory and marked as "sponsored.” WhatsApp advertising material: This image shows how the new features will look. Foto: Meta Whether users will be given the option in the future to opt out of those ads for a subscription price, and what

Published  June 17, 2025 11:51am CDT Meta replaces fact-checking with community notes Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes program written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X. Sick and tired of ads popping up on your social media? Apologies but you will soon see them on WhatsApp.  WhatsApp said users will start seeing ads in parts of the app, as owner Meta Platforms moves to cultivate a new revenue stream by tapping the billions of people that use the messaging service. 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. What they're saying: "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. The WhatsApp logo appears

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WhatsApp is to introduce paid advertising into its app for the first time, Meta has confirmed, in a new departure for the app. But advertising will not appear in private chats, which remain end to end encrypted. Instead Meta is putting the ads into its content discovery Updates tab, where WhatsApp’s Channels and Status features are located. According to Meta, the Updates tab is used by 1.5 billion people a day Business can pay to appear prominently in the Status section, making their brands more visible to consumers. The company will also enable channel owners to charge for exclusive content within WhatsApp. Promoted channels are also coming to WhatsApp, giving channel owners the option to grow their presence on the app. The move will provide Meta with a new revenue source from the popular instant messaging app. “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,” the company said in a blog post announcing the new features. However, Meta emphasised that it will use only limited information about users to serve the ads, and

WhatsApp has been talking about launching in-app advertising for many years, but today the change has finally arrived. Ads in WhatsApp are now official, here are the details of what to expect—including the finer points of how your privacy is impacted. Two types of ads are launching in WhatsApp today Today Meta announced via the official WhatsApp blog that ads are rolling out to all users now. Ads are launching as part of the Updates tab inside the app. This means they won’t be part of your private chats—at least for now. Instead, you’ll see ads integrated with the Stories-like ‘Status’ feature as well as the Channels list. Here’s an example from Meta of what this will look like: Essentially, if you’ve used Instagram Stories and seen ads there, the experience will now be very similar inside WhatsApp’s Status feature. And in the Channels list, sponsored channels will now appear. WhatsApp says it has built the ad feature “in the most private way possible.” That’s a big claim. Diving into the details though, there are several pieces of personal data WhatsApp will use to show you ads. Per their own blog post, in-app advertising will be informed by: “your country