More than a decade after Meta spent $19 billion to buy WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app is finally starting to look like a business.
Starting Monday, Meta will begin showing ads inside WhatsApp — not in your private chats, but in the app’s Updates tab, a feed that half of WhatsApp’s 3 billion month users go to each day to view ephemeral “Status” posts (WhatsApp’s version of Instagram Stories), and follow one-way “Channels” from creators, sports teams, and businesses.
The company is also rolling out paid subscriptions for Channels, letting users pay a fee to access exclusive updates from their favorite creators or organizations.
It’s the most significant monetization push in WhatsApp’s history and a defining moment for an app that has, until now, largely avoided the ads and commerce tools that power the rest of Meta’s empire.
Despite being the world’s most popular messaging app, WhatsApp has historically generated a fraction of the revenue that Facebook and Instagram do. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly framed messaging as the company’s next big business opportunity, calling it “the next major pillar of our business” after Facebook and Instagram.
“We’ve been very deliberate about building this Updates tab, which is an optional space within WhatsApp,” Nikila Srinivasan, Meta’s head of product for business messaging, told Business Insider in an interview. “We’ve really been thinking about how we can give people a space to go discover things that they’re interested in.”
WhatsApp adds money-making tools
Meta has long pledged not to put ads inside private WhatsApp chats. In a November 2023 interview, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said the company “won’t put ads in your inbox.” With 1.5 billion users visiting the Updates tab daily, Meta has found a way to make money from the app without breaking that promise.
Ads in Status will allow users to start conversations with businesses directly. Beyond ads, Meta is adding two major money-making tools to WhatsApp: the ability for businesses to pay to promote their Channels in the app and for Channel creators to charge users for exclusive content.
Srinivasan says Meta won’t take a cut of that transaction. “At least not for this year, we’re not,” she said.
Promoted channels will allow creators and businesses to increase their visibility within WhatsApp’s directory of Channels.
“This ability to be discovered in WhatsApp is something that’s been a longtime request that we’ve had from businesses,” Srinivasan said. “For a lot of small businesses that run their entire business on WhatsApp, this is a great way to get discovered by people who wouldn’t have found them otherwise.”
Meta reassures users about privacy
Meta says it built the new features with privacy at their core. Ads will only appear in the Updates tab, away from private chats, and will be targeted using minimal information like a user’s city, language, and activity, such as what Channels they follow or how they interact with ads. The company said that personal messages, calls, and groups remain end-to-end encrypted and cannot be accessed for advertising purposes.
“We’ve talked for a while now about how we want to build a business that doesn’t interrupt your inbox,” Srinivasan said. “Given the traction that we saw on the Updates tab, it felt like a good time for us to expand this to a broader ecosystem of businesses and also deliver on what people are going to that tab to do.”
Meta is taking pains to reassure users now, as some might resent advertising in an app where they have their most private conversations. In 2021, an update to WhatsApp’s terms of service — meant to clarify how businesses could talk to users — triggered a wave of user backlash and misinformation. The incident showed just how fragile user trust can be, especially in a product built on the promise of privacy.
“This is not in your inbox,” Srinivasan said. “This is only in Updates. You have to go to that tab to actually encounter these experiences.”
WhatsApp already generates revenue from click-to-message ads, which appear on Facebook and Instagram and let users instantly open conversations with businesses on WhatsApp.
For Meta, this is the next step in turning WhatsApp into something bigger than a chat app.
Zuckerberg has long pointed to Asia, where super apps like WeChat let users do everything from shopping to booking flights, as a model. Over the past few years, WhatsApp has slowly added pieces of that vision: shopping catalogs, payments, and customer service tools, among other features. Ads and creator subscriptions are the next step in that journey.
“This is not a pivot,” Srinivasan said. “It’s an evolution.”
