Top man WhatsApp: ads in status display will become primary revenue model

Placing ads in WhatsApp’s status display will become the chat app’s primary way of making money, a CEO says. Until now, WhatsApp has been ad-free since its inception.

Last week, WhatsApp confirmed that the chat app would receive advertisements in the status display and now CEO Chris Daniels has explained during a meeting of journalists in the Indian city of New Delhi, NDTV writes. Users will be able to block ads from certain companies in the settings and mute ads on the status page itself.

The ads will become the primary way for businesses to reach consumers through the chat app. A majority of the population in the Benelux uses the app to send and receive messages. It is unknown how many people get into the status section of WhatsApp.

It is the first time that parent company Facebook wants to make money from WhatsApp. The ads on the status page are the main way to make money, but Daniels has not said whether ads will appear in WhatsApp in other ways. The ads will appear in the app from next year. Exactly what they will look like is unknown.

The founders of WhatsApp, who will continue to work for Facebook after the acquisition, have since left. The reason for Jan Koum is unknown, but Brian Acton left the company partly because of Facebook’s insistence on making money through advertisements. Acton and Koum were always vehemently against ads in their chat app. In the early years, they conducted experiments where users could pay for WhatsApp. The chat app has 1.5 billion users worldwide.