It’s official, ads are coming to WhatsApp. However, depending on how you use the popular messaging app, you may never see one.
Hot on the heels of the welcome addition of a proper WhatsApp iPad App, WhatsApp has confirmed it’s introducing ads to the platform alongside a couple of other features for businesses and channels to utilise.
It’s a move which we’re surprised took Meta – WhatsApp’s parent company – as long as it did to make, but it does go against the app’s co-founder’s promise that it would never have ads.
All three features are dedicated to the Updates tab in WhatsApp, which means your regular chats should be unaffected by the changes.
WhatsApp has introduced three new, revenue-generating features, and ‘Ads in Status’ is the big one for casual users of WhatsApp.
The app’s existing Status function works in a similar way to Instagram’s Stories, allowing users to post disappearing (after 24 hours) updates – such as images, videos and text – for contacts to view.
Now with Ads in Status, when you’re viewing Status posts from friends and family you may be served an ad in between them. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this already exists on Instagram.
Some of your data will be used to serve you more relevant ads, with WhatsApp saying “we’ll use limited info like your country or city, language, the Channels you’re following, and how you interact with the ads you see.”
The other two features WhatsApp has introduced are Channel subscriptions and Promoted Channels. With Channel subscriptions you can pay a monthly fee in return for “exclusive updates” from your favorite channel.
Meanwhile, Promoted Channels allows owners to boost their visibility in listings, and potentially surfacing channels that could be most interesting to you.
We contacted Meta who told us it would “be rolling these updates out slowly over the next several months” to users globally, so you may not see the changes in the Updates tab right away.
The spokesperson also noted that the new features would arrive via an app update, so if you want to put off the changes for as long as possible, turn off auto-update on your phone. There will come a point however, where WhatsApp will need you to update for the app to continue working.
And when we asked what Meta was planning to do with the additional revenue generated by these new features, we were told it would “help us to keep building more that users want.”
While you can’t turn off or disable WhatsApp ads, if you purely only just the ‘Chats’ tab of the app you’ll never run into any of these ads or promoted channels.
WhatsApp is keeping these new features in the Updates tab only – at least for the time being. We can’t predict what will happen in the future.
If you’re not a fan of this direction from WhatsApp you can remove the app from your phone. Before you uninstall WhatsApp though, be sure to delete your account.
Deleting your WhatsApp account will do the following, so make sure this is something you really want to do, as even WhatsApp notes “deleting your account is irreversible. We can’t reverse this even if you delete it by accident.”
To delete your WhatsApp account, open the app on your main device as head to Settings > Account > Delete My Account. Then follow the on-screen prompts to delete your account.
Once your account is deleted, exit WhatsApp and hold down on the app icon to follow your phone’s standard app uninstall process.
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