WhatsApp has announced it will begin showing ads within its app for the first time, ending a decade-long stance against advertising and signaling a significant shift in the platform’s philosophy.
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The announcement was made Monday at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, where WhatsApp unveiled new monetization features, including in-app ads in the “Updates” tab, paid monthly subscriptions for content creators, and channel promotions.
The ads will appear only in the Updates section — used by over 1.5 billion users daily — and will not intrude on personal messages or chats, which remain end-to-end encrypted. Data such as users’ locations and phone language settings may be used to target ads, but the content of messages and user contacts will not be accessed.
“Your personal messages, calls and statuses will remain end-to-end encrypted,” said Nikila Srinivasan, WhatsApp’s VP of product management. “Thinking through the lens of privacy was incredibly important.”
Founded in 2009 with a strict “no ads, no games, no gimmicks” philosophy, WhatsApp maintained a clean, private messaging environment even after its $19 billion acquisition by Facebook (now Meta) in 2014. The founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, departed in 2017 amid privacy-related tensions with Facebook.
Since then, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expanded WhatsApp’s integration into the company’s wider ecosystem, aligning it with platforms like Instagram and Messenger. The move to ads opens a new revenue frontier for Meta, which earned almost all of its $164 billion revenue last year from advertising.
Meta has also begun offering monetization tools on WhatsApp, including subscriptions for content creators and click-to-message ads that connect businesses on Facebook and Instagram to users on WhatsApp — already a multibillion-dollar stream.
Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, defended the changes, emphasizing user privacy remains intact:
“We work hard to protect the privacy of people’s communications,” Cathcart said. “Nothing is changing about private chats and calls.”
Still, the move has raised questions. Critics point to the platform’s 2021 privacy backlash, when proposed terms updates led to a user exodus. Minda Smiley, a senior analyst at eMarketer, said WhatsApp’s longstanding reputation for privacy may clash with this advertising strategy:
“Since privacy has been such a tent pole of WhatsApp’s business model, I think there’s definitely some challenges.”
WhatsApp assures that linking the app with Facebook or Instagram for ad personalization is optional, and users can opt out.
Meanwhile, the company continues to defend its encryption standards globally. It recently joined Apple in opposing the UK’s efforts to weaken encryption across messaging platforms.
“Encryption is the bedrock of what we are,” Cathcart previously said. “It will never change, even as we add updates.”
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