It's official (sort of). WhatsApp will have advertising next year. This has been confirmed thanks to the information shared at the Facebook Marketing Summit that the company recently held in Rotterdam and where they have gone into details of how the messaging service will begin to show ads to users.
Advertising yes, but without abusing
It is a movement that many could expect, since, although it was something completely contrary to the principles of its creators, since Facebook took over the service, it was a matter of time before the company began to monetize one of the services of most used messaging in the world. But calm down because for the moment it seems that things will start slowly.
The image that could be seen in the presentation showed the different ways in which a business could promote itself through WhatsApp Business, either in a Facebook ad that leads to WhatsApp, an Instagram ad that does the same, or, beware, an ad posted between the WhatsApp statuses. This last option would be the first mechanism to display advertising that they will use on WhatsApp, a method reminiscent of the one used on Instagram in their Stories.
WhatsApp will bring Stories Ads into its status product in 2020. #FMS19 pic.twitter.com/OI3TWMmfKj
- Olivier Ponteville (@Olivier_Ptv) May 21th 2019
How WhatsApp advertising will work
As some event attendees have pointed out via Twitter, it is important to note that this advertising will be limited to appearing in the States, so it shouldn't show up anywhere else in the app. What does this mean? Well, in none of these cases we will see advertising (at least for now:
- There will be no integrated advertising within the chats. Can you imagine talking to a friend about a concert and advertising for it appearing in the conversation? Relax, it's not going to happen.
- There will be no advertising in the list of chats. Forget finding advertising banners among the list of chats you have open. There will be no such option.
To be clear (I was also present at #FMS19): for now, NO ads in #WhatsApp inbox or in Whatsapp Conversations, only in Status. All other screenshots are messaging formats for Whatsapp for Business, NOT paid ad formats. https://t.co/rYDGx2j9xD
—Ruben Ceuppens (@RubenCeuppens) May 23th 2019
For now, advertising will only appear among the States of your contacts, so you should not worry too much. If you are one of those who uses the States function, for now you can continue doing it calmly, since the announcements would not arrive until 2020, the date that has been seen indicated on the slide of the presentation.