WhatsApp Advertising Coming Soon

| Social media

WhatsApp Advertising Coming Soon

 

It looks like Facebook will be turning WhatsApp into a new advertising channel, as it did with its own platform, Instagram and Messenger.

As with all social and search platforms, advertising is a primary revenue source and soon it will be no different for the extremely popular messaging platform which will begin to start showing ads alongside its Status feature at some point this year.

WhatsApp’s Vice President, Chris Daniels, said that the ads will be the service’s “primary monetisation mode for the company” as well as an “opportunity for businesses to reach people”.

Of course, this move isn’t that surprising with the success Facebook Messenger has had with ads and the mass of people that are now using WhatsApp (over 1 billion daily active users). Facebook has continually expanded its advertising channels across all their platforms, and it seemed like an inevitable path the instant messenger app would go down eventually.

Since Facebook acquired WhatsApp back in 2014 for $19 billion, many have been wondering how the messaging app was going to monetise itself since it dropped its subscription fee back in 2016.

Advertising did seem like the only way to go even though the company said at the time “you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication.”

However, three years on and with the founders having left the company, Facebook will start testing advertising within the Snapchat knockoff WhatsApp Status, that was launched back in February 2017 and has since surpassed Snapchat usage with 450 million daily users.

Snapchat has seen a lot of success with advertising on their platform and it will be interesting to see if WhatsApp will strategically place ads in a similar way to avoid annoying users.

With over 1.5 billion active monthly users, we are sure that the platform will draw in a lot of businesses and marketers as it will have a lot of potential to increase brand awareness, expand reach and drive more leads, as well as a new platform for all those brands to fight to get noticed.

Luke Stanley