WhatsApp to start showing ads: What to know
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Sick and tired of ads popping up on your social media? Apologies but you will soon see them on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp said users will start seeing ads in parts of the app, as owner Meta Platforms moves to cultivate a new revenue stream by tapping the billions of people that use the messaging service.
Advertisements will be shown only in the app's Updates tab, which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day. However, they won't appear where personal chats are located, developers said.
What they're saying:
"The personal messaging experience on WhatsApp isn’t changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads," WhatsApp said in a blog post.
It’s a big change for the company, whose founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton vowed to keep the platform free of ads when they created it in 2009.
The WhatsApp logo appears on a smartphone screen in this illustration photo in Reno, United States, on January 1, 2025. (Photo by Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
WhatsApp said ads will be targeted to users based on information like their age, the country or city where they're located, the language they're using, the channels they're following in the app, and how they're interacting with the ads they see.
WhatsApp said it won't use personal messages, calls and groups that a user is a member of to target ads to the user.
The backstory:
Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014 and the pair left a few years later. Parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has long been trying to generate revenue from WhatsApp.
By the numbers:
Most of Meta's revenue comes from ads. In 2025, the Menlo Park, California-based company's revenue totaled $164.5 billion and $160.6 billion of it came from advertising.
The Source: The Associated Press contributed to this report. The information in this story comes from an official blog post by WhatsApp, where the company explained its plans to introduce ads in the Updates tab while maintaining the privacy of personal messages and calls. This story was reported from Los Angeles.