WhatsApp Status ads coming your way soon.

by Enock Bett · January 6, 2020

Facebook has announced that its messaging platform, WhatsApp, will start to show Status ads this year. Facebook announced this during its annual Marketing Summit in the Netherlands. The summit brought together thousands of marketers, builders, and thinkers hoping to explore the future of building business who shared valuable insights and practical learning of building a stronger community. Facebook revealed how the ads will look to the attendees. The ads on WhatsApp will take up the entire screen as they do on Instagram when you click on them. The ads will pop up on your screen as you browse through your friends’ statuses.

The name of the company will show up on the ads just like when you click on status and your friend’s name appear. What is not clear, however, is the data that Facebook will use to customize their advertisements for their users. I will of course not connect with a USA Starbucks advertisement and I wouldn’t want any that doesn’t relate to me to appear on my timeline. So what kind of data will Facebook use apart from the country code?

WhatsApp cofounders Jan Koum and Brian Acton left the company after realizing that Zuckerberg was always in a constant rush to make money which did not please them. Users from across the world have vowed to delete the app immediately it starts showing ads, but I’m sure they can’t. Personally, I’d rather not view any status but continue using the messaging platform which has proven to be the most effective over the years.

WhatsApp is currently working on a feature that would enable its users to set a self-destruct time limit for the messages they send to their friends. Meaning after the elapse of the set time, the messages sent would disappear completely as if they never existed. Now since people have developed other applications that allow them to revoke ‘delete for everyone’ messages and deleted statuses, it will be interesting to see whether other apps that would revoke the disappeared messages would be created.

WhatsApp is also working on a dark theme and a feature to hide muted status updates completely rather than showing them at the bottom of viewed status in grey. Facebook continues to work on very interesting features. The ads they’re about to put on our screens, however, will be a bad idea for us, but a very profitable business venture for the company considering more than one billion people are on WhatApp and will be able to interact with the ads on a personal level.

WhatsApp rolled its Status feature in February 2017 to allow users to share texts, photos, videos and GIF updates that disappear after 24 hours. One sends and receives status updates to and from their contacts, who also must have each other’s phone numbers saved in their phones’ address books.

Zuckerberg acquired WhatsApp in February 2014 for $19 billion after determining that the app was possibly going to kill Facebook Messenger and consequently bring down to its knees his entire company.