After offering WhatsApp as a free messaging platform for years, Meta is now beginning to introduce advertisements. The reassuring part is that these ads won’t appear in personal chats, preserving the core messaging experience.
In an official blog post, the Meta-owned platform announced a bunch of updates that are scheduled to arrive on WhatsApp. All these new features will revolve around the "Updates" tab and will especially target its business users to help them promote their businesses effectively and reach a wider audience with ease.
Starting with advertisements, WhatsApp will finally show you ads in statuses. These adverts will be strategically placed between WhatsApp statuses to help businesses promote themselves and allow users to directly initiate conversations via the status updates themselves. This feature is similar to what we already experience on Instagram currently.
In order to do so, Meta will collect data like your country or city, language, and the Channels you are following. This information will then be used to deliver targeted ads and understand how you interact with them.
Additionally, if you have added WhatsApp to the Meta Accounts Centre, the platform will be able to use that saved preference info to serve you ads as well.
However, there is a silver lining to this. Meta has confirmed that these ads will only be visible via the status tab. This means that personal chats and interactions on the platform are still free from any distractions.
Next up is Channel subscriptions, where the channels that you follow will be able to add a subscription tier to the experience. This means that for a monthly set fee, you will be able to receive exclusive updates from them that will not be otherwise shared via the regular channel updates.
However, do note that the type and the frequency of content shown entirely depend on the channel manager. And the same translates to the monthly fee that will be set for them.
Lastly, Promoted Channels will help you discover new channels that suit your preferences and that Meta thinks you will like to subscribe to.
As you can already see, all these updates are targeted at businesses, more specifically, WhatsApp Business users. Meta claims that more than 1.5 billion people use the updates tab daily. While
While Meta has not announced a set date of release, expect to see these new features gradually roll out.
