WhatsApp Ads to Come This Year Only a few months back, Daniel had announced, “We are going to be putting ads in Status. That is going to be primary monetisation mode for the company as well as an opportunity for businesses to reach people on WhatsApp.” Although there is not more information available as to how these ads would work, it is pretty much clear that the ads would be working based on Facebook’s native advertisement platform and they would be aimed at connecting the people through the WhatsApp Business, of that particular brand or advertiser. WhatsApp Co-Founders at Odds With Zuckerberg In the past, there has been a row between Mark Zuckerberg and Jan Koum, which was the founder of WhatsApp. While Jan had been adamant on keeping WhatsApp ads-free, Mark Zuckerberg had decided to roll out ads on the platforms. This had also led to Jan leaving the company. Brian Acton, another co-founder of WhatsApp, was also unhappy with the decision and said that targeted advertising is something that makes him “unhappy”. He also alleged that Zuckerberg was in a hurry to make money by monetising WhatsApp, and this would also lead to undermining the encryption technology which supports security and privacy on WhatsApp. It is worth noting that WhatsApp chats are end to end encrypted. Some WhatsApp Users Also Unhappy The application boasts of having 1.5 billion users across the globe, and in India alone, it has 400 million users. There has been a long ongoing debate about privacy with Facebook, targeted advertisement, and how people feel about sharing their data online. The users have also not taken the news of targeted advertisement on the platform not too well. This means that when Facebook decides to roll out ads on WhatsApp, it might see a little backlash from the users. The primary concern amidst the rollout of the ads is of privacy. WhatsApp uses end to end encryption, thus implying that it cannot read your messages or access your data. However, if the ads are to be rolled out, they cannot be made relevant to the users, unless some amount of data is used for targeting, thus creating a contradiction.
