WhatsApp will begin displaying advertisements inside the app in a move that ends more than a decade of resistance to commercial messaging on the world’s most widely used chat platform.
The shift marks a new phase for Meta Platforms as it tries to squeeze fresh revenue from a service long treated as a loss leader within its portfolio.
In a statement posted on Monday, WhatsApp confirmed that advertisements will appear only in the Updates tab. This section houses Status updates and the fast growing Channels feature, which together attract an estimated 1.5 billion users each day.
The company insisted that personal chats will remain untouched and that end to end encryption will continue to shield messages, calls and group conversations from data harvesting.
The developers said the personal messaging experience is not changing and that individual chats cannot be used to serve targeted promotions. This distinction is meant to calm long standing fears that advertising would erode the privacy foundation on which WhatsApp was built.
The announcement marks a break with the ideology of founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who launched WhatsApp in 2009 and frequently dismissed ads as intrusive. Both men left the company after clashes with Meta leadership over commercial strategy, especially around data sharing.
Meta has struggled to monetise WhatsApp’s more than 2.5 billion users and is now rolling out a set of revenue features. These include ads in the Updates tab, paid subscriptions for Channels offering exclusive posts and promoted channels that businesses can pay to elevate.
The ads will rely on limited user information such as age, language, city or country and the Channels someone follows. WhatsApp stressed that private chats will not inform targeting decisions.
Analysts say the move signals a turning point for a service often described as a sleeping giant inside Meta. It offers new financial promise but risks testing the patience of users who valued its clean and uncluttered design.
