TEKNOKU.me – In 2020 it is certain that there will be big changes on WhatsApp. Ads will pass in the world’s largest messaging application, something that has never happened before.
Yes, since it was founded in 2009, WhatsApp has no ads. But in the middle of last year, Facebook as the owner of WhatsApp announced that ads will enter WhatsApp in 2020, both on Android and iOS versions.
The announcement was made by Facebook at the Facebook Marketing Summit event. Social media analyst Matt Navarra managed to take photos from presentations that show how the ad will appear in the Status feature.
The ad that appears looks the same as the normal WhatsApp status post and fills the entire screen. The difference is if the WhatsApp status shows the contact’s name, it shows the name of the company that is placing the ad.
Also under this ad, there will be a link that can be swiped up to see more information about the product being advertised.
Not yet known whether for now, Facebook has other design plans for advertising inside WhatsApp. It is possible that the company, which is headquartered in Menlo Park, USA can display smaller alternative ads that appear between the conversation lists.
When the announcement spread, some WhatsApp users expressed disappointment.
What may make, Facebook, as a company would want to buy WhatsApp worth USD 19 billion in 2019, can produce reciprocity. Especially considering the number of users who billions.
This step is strictly forbidden by the founders of WhatsApp, Jan Koum and Brian Acton. The two founders who had left Facebook, allegedly because they did not agree with the plans for advertising on WhatsApp, have always expressed these principles.
In 2012, two years before Facebook bought WhatsApp, Koum wrote about the displeasure with advertising. “We want to create services that people want to use. We know we can do what people want every day, which is to avoid advertising,” Jan said.
“Nobody wakes up and is interested in seeing more advertisements, nobody sleeps thinking about the ads they will see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep thinking about who they are chatting with or disappointed about not doing,” he explained.
He considers advertising to damage the aesthetics and insult to intelligence. Koum also promised the engineers on WhatsApp their job is not to collect data, but to create new features or fix bugs for the users.
At that time as a monetization method, WhatsApp withdrew a small fee to use the service, only for USD 1. A few years after Facebook was purchased, the monetization method was eliminated.