Its been long over due for Facebook to start monetizing WhatsApp Messenger with Ads, since they acquired it in 2014 for $22 billion. The company is back tracking from its earlier plans to sell ads for placement inside its popular messaging service. According to The Wall Street Journal, the team that had been working on building ads into WhatsApp was taken off this project in recent months, with their work subsequently “deleted from WhatsApp’s code.”
As we reported earlier, Facebook will still introduce Ads but they will integrate them into WhatsApp’s Status feature, just like it is on Instagram Stories. For now, the app will remain ad-free. The company’s desire to monetize WhatsApp, drove WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum out of Facebook in 2018. His fellow co-founder Brian Acton left months earlier (over similar clashes related to privacy and targeted advertising).
The advertising setback has led Facebook to instead focus on WhatsApp Messenger features that will “allow businesses to communicate with customers and organize those contacts.” Koum and Acton were reportedly concerned that a commercial messaging feature would force WhatsApp to weaken its end-to-end encryption.
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But this was all before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans last year to gradually shift away from public posts in favor of a unified, encrypted messaging system across Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger, and Instagram. As the company is now discovering, bringing ads to an encrypted service comes with challenges.
