Meta said Monday it will be rolling out adverts on WhatsApp in a bid to monetise a user base of approximately three billion monthly active users.
Adverts will be kept separate from the main chat area it said.
“Our ads will appear in the Updates tab, in Status and Channels, where people are open to discovery. The personal messaging experience on WhatsApp isn’t changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads,” Meta added.
While many customers just use WhatsApp for DMs, Meta claims over 1.5 billion users visit the WhatsApp “Updates” tab every day to get “Status” updates or view “Channels” for a social feed of updates from individuals or organisations. (Everything’s a social platform now, didn’t ya know?)
Want to advertise in WhatsApp? “Promoted channel ads help your business get discovered by boosting your channel in the directory and making it easy for people to find content that’s right for them,” it claims.
It will share device information and “general” location with advertisers but promised to protect the privacy of its “end-to-end encrypted” messages.
On July 1, 2025 meanwhile, it will also roll out updated pricing for its ~200 million monthly business users – tweaking rates for “utility” and “authentication” as it looks to improve business use and monetisation.
It will also shift from “per conversation” to “per message” pricing.
(Current business prices are here. Prices effective July 1, 2025 are here.)
Meta reported quarterly revenues of $41.9 billion in April 2025.
WhatsApp revenues are a small proportion of that. It breaks those out as “other revenue” in its family of apps segment and put the figure for this category at $510 million, up 34% in Q1, “driven mostly by business messaging revenue growth from our WhatsApp Business Platform.”
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