WhatsApp is without a doubt one of the most popular messaging apps in the world. One of the reasons for its huge success is that it is completely ad-free. The users do not have to be annoyed by constant popups but that might be about to change.
David Marcus, Facebook’s Vice President of Messaging Products said that WhatsApp will now be open to advertisers. “As far as advertising is concerned, we’re definitely getting WhatsApp more open. We’re now going to have the ability to enable larger companies, not only small businesses, to integrate a new API [application programming interface] to send and receive messages with people on the WhatsApp platform.”
Jan Koum, WhatsApp founder left Facebook last week and this is a confirmation of the speculations that the messaging app will now roll out ads. Even though Koum did not officially give a reason for leaving, but the rumors are that he was against the ad-based revenue generation and data targetting that the messaging app now plans to do.
Being the world’s most popular chat app, WhatsApp has 1.5 billion monthly users. Even though the app is now owned by Facebook, they claim that they do not read messages sent over WhatsApp but the same cannot be said about Facebook messenger where every message is scanned.
WhatsApp has remained ad-free ever since it was created and even after Facebook bought it for $19 billion in 2014. That might change very soon and it has disappointed a lot of users.
