Millions of fans have been enraged when they found out that Facebook intends to show ads on its popular messaging platform WhatsApp. However, good news has surfaced now, claiming the tech giant has shelved its intents regarding this matter, at least for now.
According to a report published in the Wall Street Journal, WhatsApp disintegrated the team working on incorporating ads on to the platform quite recently. Even the code linked to the project was removed from the app, the report says.
When Facebook acquired WhatsApp, back in 2014 for $19 billion, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the tech giant wouldn’t consider introducing adds into the messaging app. Back in 2016, the company began sharing user data from WhatsApp to Facebook for a better ad targeting, apparently.
Facebook has also planned to incorporate ads in the platform, which is one of the main reasons the WhatsApp co-founder, Jan Koum, left the company in 2018. The messaging app’s founders always hated ads, and the other co-founder, Brian Acton, told Forbesback in 2014: “You don’t make anyone’s life better by making advertisements work better.”
Ads Implementation is on the Shelf For Now
The initial report mentioned the fact that while Facebook won’t incorporate ads into the core WhatsApp experience, at least not now, it still intends to show some ads in the platform’s Status functionality.
In 2016 alone, WhatsApp removed its annual fee of 99 cents completely and made the app free to download and use. Since then, the tech giant has been attempting a new method to earn money out of it. It has also experimenting with this in India, with a payments platform, due to the fact that the country has more than 400 million WhatsApp users.
However, the app also has the WhatsApp Business version, which enables businesses to connect with their clients in an efficient and simple way. The version charges a small fee in order to facilitate its functionality.
