Hisham Sarwar
Founded by two friends Jan Koum and Brian Acton in 2009, WhatsApp quickly grew popular as the world’s most famous video/chat app. The company was acquired by Facebook on February 19, 2014. Within a few months, the original founders began to have differences with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook, primarily on introducing advertisement in the app.
Both co-founders felt curtailed, eventually resigned from the parent company Facebook and left the company.
For years, a question has always confused everybody, how does WhatsApp make money if it is free?.
Well, the answer may be available soon. It is because the idea was to build a huge client base by having massive numbers of users use the app and then introduce advertisements to monetize the business.
After Facebook in hot waters in the last couple of years because of privacy issues, WhatsApp received its due criticism too. People began to voice their opinion about WhatsApp not being the best chat app, especially when the app began to face huge downtime, had privacy concerns in recent past. People have already begun switching to Telegram believing it might just be the right platform to use in the future.
In its annual Facebook Marketing Summit in the Netherlands this week, Facebook has confirmed that ads will be shown on Statuses. This is also confirmed by a verified profile on Twitter showing us how the ads will show on WhatsApp in the future.
The ads will start appearing in the app in 2020.
Coming Soon to @WhatsApp…
– WhatsApp Status (Stories) to get Ads in 2020
– WhatsApp for Businesses to get richer messaging format options
– WhatsApp product catalog to be integrated with existing Facebook Business Manager catalog
h/t + 📸 @Olivier_Ptv
at #FMS19 pic.twitter.com/Z5LsbADNbP— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) May 21, 2019
How would you react to this decision of showing ads in the app?
