WhatsApp abandons its ad-free promise
發佈日期: 2025-06-17 20:11
TVB News
Messaging platform WhatsApp said its users will start seeing ads in parts of the app, as owner Meta Platforms moves to cultivate a new revenue stream by tapping the billions of people that use the service.
WhatsApp, which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day, will roll out advertisement features.
In a blog post, WhatsApp said the personal messaging experience is not changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads.
Instead, ads will be shown only in the app's Updates tab to separate promotions from users' personal conversations.
Such an announcement signals a big change for the company, whose founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton vowed to keep the platform free of ads when they created it in 2009.
A digital marketing expert says the Meta-owned platform's latest decision is inevitable because it has yet to take advantage of its massive user base.
TONY DEGENNARO, Head of Strategy, HK-based digital marketing firm: "Facebook (Meta) is trying to get a return on their investment. I think for a long time, they thought of it as, like a gesture of goodwill, that they left it ad free and that they let everybody to use it for free. But it's pretty inevitable that they are going to have to introduce some form of monetisation to this."
But Degennaro says Meta's latest move is not without risk TONY DEGENNARO, Head of Strategy, HK-based digital marketing firm: "Because people use it as a messenger, right. If you start adding a bunch of things there that people don't want and distract from the core messaging service, I think it will actually hurt WhatsApp in the long run. And there are replacements for WhatsApp."
Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014 and Koum and Acton left a few years later.
