Social media giant, Meta has disputed a media report of it bringing ads to the popular messaging app WhatsApp.
The media report was made by Financial Times earlier.
The report said that some teams at Meta had evaluated the plan to show ads in lists of conversations with contacts on the WhatsApp home screen. WhatsApp however has claimed the report is not true.
In a statement, WhatsApp said it has no such plans and that it was neither testing nor working on it.
Head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart,also gave a similar response to an @FTtech post on X. The post that said, “WhatsApp explores ads in chat app as Meta seeks revenue boost.” Quoting the post, Cathcart responded “this @Ft story is false. We are not doing this…”
Analysts have long speculated that Meta will eventually bring ads to WhatsApp. It is one of the explorable options to monetize the service.
Meta has so far resisted the idea and instead, relied on making money via WhatsApp Business.
WhatsApp Business is a version of WhatsApp meant for merchants that requires them to pay for certain services.
WhatsApp Business has over 200 million monthly active users.
In February, Meta announced changes to the pricing structure and messaging categories on WhatsApp Business. This was basically towards increasing revenue.
The categories included utility, authentication (to send one-time passcodes), marketing and user-initiated service conversations.
As at Q3 last year, Zuckerberg noted that “click-to-WhatsApp” ads had reached the annual revenue run rate of $1.5 billion. That’s 80% year-on-year growth.
The company plans to introduce a personalized messages model for merchants soon.
This will facilitate peer-to-peer and customer-to-merchant payments in countries like India, Brazil and Singapore.
In May, the company said it is exploring ways to integrate payments into Channels. Channels is WhatsApp’s new broadcasting feature. It was launched last week.
Some analysts are insisting on the monetization plan from watching the trend as WhatsApp grows.
Analysts at AllianceBernstein recently wrote ;
“With WhatsApp Business users reaching 200M MAU, and GenAI customer service tools being tested out, Meta appears to be taking steps towards monetizing the 2Bn+ active users on WhatsApp. Click to Message is already running at a 10B+ revenue run rate while training both the users and businesses to interact within WhatsApp.”
