WhatsApp, which originally started with the principle of "no ads, no disturbances," has finally taken a crucial step towards commercialization. This week, Meta officially confirmed that it will introduce advertising features in WhatsApp in the coming months. This change signifies that the world's most popular communication app is also starting to break away from its "pure land" image, opening new avenues for monetization.
According to Meta, the ads will not appear in the chat interface but will be cautiously placed on the "Updates" page at the bottom left of WhatsApp, which is where the "Status" feature is located. This page, similar to Instagram's "Stories" or WeChat's "Moments," attracts about 1.5 billion users daily. Although it is not as frequently used as the chat function, it serves as an important exposure window for brands and businesses.
Currently, WhatsApp has over 3 billion monthly active users globally, including about 200 million business accounts, and the advertising feature is designed to meet these businesses' urgent needs for promotional channels. The Vice President of WhatsApp Business stated that businesses have been seeking advertising spaces, while also caring about user privacy. Therefore, the "Status" page has become a compromise solution that avoids disrupting private conversations while providing commercial value.
Following the announcement, Meta's stock price rose by more than 3.5% during the U.S. stock market session, reflecting the capital market's optimistic expectations for WhatsApp's commercial potential.
In fact, WhatsApp's transformation is not sudden. When it was acquired by Meta in 2014, its founders publicly promised "no ads" and upheld a simple, undisturbed user experience as their creed. However, as the social platform's traffic bonus diminishes, Meta has gradually monetized its applications, with WhatsApp being the last "gold mine" yet to be commercialized.
Interestingly, it seems that Meta still hopes to maintain WhatsApp's brand trust. The product team emphasized that all advertising will avoid the core communication experience and promised to continue preserving the "end-to-end encryption" of chats, calls, and status content. Ads will mainly be personalized based on users' basic information, such as language preferences, geographical location, and interest channels.
At the same time, WhatsApp also announced the launch of a "channel subscription" feature, allowing brands, media, or creators to provide exclusive content through paid subscriptions. Small businesses can also promote their channels through paid promotions to gain more exposure.
For this transformation, many users may resist, but Meta is clearly well-prepared psychologically. Just like Netflix, which once vowed never to introduce ads but eventually launched an ad-supported subscription plan in 2022, not only did it not lose users, but it also stimulated a rebound in performance.
In an era where advertising is increasingly becoming a core profit-making tool for digital platforms, users' "tolerance" is also continuously increasing. Early YouTube ads could be skipped after 5 seconds, but now it's common to start with a minute; Netflix's advertising plan has also been accepted by the market. Meta, with its rich advertising operational experience, is likely to gradually deepen its advertising layout on WhatsApp, tapping into the commercial potential of this super app.
It can be anticipated that WhatsApp ads are just the beginning. In the future, we may see more forms of monetization attempts, which could become Meta's new growth engines, continuously injecting momentum into its stock price and revenue.
