WhatsApp introduces advertising

Jan Johannsen

16/6/2025

Translation: machine translated

"No advertising": Eleven years after the sale to Meta, the mantra of WhatsApp's founders is history. There are now adverts in the messenger app.

Slight all-clear beforehand: Those who only use WhatsApp for chats will also be able to get away without adverts in the future. Meta only wants to display these in the status messages in the tab «News». This should be very similar to advertising in Instagram and Facebook stories.

Advertising in the latest section of Messenger

According to Meta, 1.5 billion people currently use the News tab every day. With this reach, the company now wants to help Geld verdienen « admins, organisations and companies to grow on WhatsApp», according to the official announcement. There are three options for growth:

• Advertisements in the status: Adverts can be seen between the status messages of your contacts and the channels you follow
• Advertised channels: Channel operators can spend money to be shown to new users.
• Channel subscriptions: No traditional advertising, but the option to watch additional content on channels for a monthly fee. Similar to what is already possible with Twitch, Patreon, Steady and co.

There will still be no adverts on the WhatsApp homepage or in chats. According to Meta, anyone who does not click on the News tab will not see any adverts.

End-to-end encryption to remain untouched

The end-to-end encryption of messages, calls and status messages will not be affected by the adverts. According to Meta, the company only uses limited information to personalise the ads, such as «your country or city, your language, the channels you follow and your interactions with ads.» If someone has added their WhatsApp account to Meta's account overview - for example to post status messages directly to Instagram or Facebook - the company also uses «advertising preferences and ad information» from other accounts.

Meta also makes it clear that it will never share «phone numbers» with advertisers or sell them to them. In addition, «personal messages, calls and groups» will not be used to select adverts.

It should also be clear to Meta that not all users will be happy about the adverts. At least that's what interviews with WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart, which were published at the same time as the announcement, suggest. An example from Spiegel .

The advert at least has the potential to make some people switch to other messengers such as Threema or Signal. However, similar waves following critical decisions by Meta regarding WhatsApp have failed to have a lasting impact in the past.

Jan Johannsen

Senior Editor

Jan.Johannsen@galaxus.de

As a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus. more

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