Next to the states will be inserted banner ads that companies can use to promote their products. The novelty will be active from 2019
Adverts will make their debut on WhatsApp from 2019. And it is not a fake news, but a news published by the Wall Street Journal, which cites sources inside the U.S. company. Facebook, which has purchased the application for several years now, seems to have decided to make WhatsApp profitable by inserting banner ads within the states.
The big change will be active in the first months of 2019 and will be accompanied by another big news always announced in recent days: WhatsApp will become paid, but not for everyone. Developers have released new APIs for WhatsApp Business (the version of the messaging app dedicated to businesses) that allow large companies to get directly in touch with customers and support them during the purchase phase or for customer care. Businesses that use the new APIs will have 24 hours to respond to users’ messages, otherwise they will have to pay some sort of fine to WhatsApp.
Advertising within the States
Banner ads will be placed within the section that collects all people’s States, that is, the images that disappear after 24 hours and that WhatsApp has copied from Instagram Stories. Within this page users will find in addition to the States also advertisements of companies. For the moment we don’t know exactly neither the size nor the number of advertising banners, but given the small space available they should not be very large.
For the messaging application this is a momentous change: so far the management had always denied the possibility of introducing some kind of remuneration system within WhatsApp, but most likely the management costs have become impossible to sustain even for a company like Facebook. The usability and features offered by WhatsApp should not be affected much: it is only a banner ad placed in a secondary section of the application.
Official confirmations from WhatsApp have not arrived: we wait for the next few months to see how the situation will evolve. But the fact that they are talking about it, is a confirmation that Facebook is thinking about how to make the application profitable and advertising on WhatsApp is one of the possible solutions.