People won’t be a fan of the latest development at Facebook, who at a conference announced that WhatsApp will be getting ads by 2020. The slide showed that the ads will be integrated within the status feature of the app. That means that when people will be viewing statuses they would have to view ads. That seems to be a far better execution of ads rather than having a permanent ad box on top of the chat list, that would be annoying enough for people to choose alternate apps.
The ad business within apps is growing like crazy and Facebook wants to get in on the act. It was initially rumored that Facebook would start charging for whatsapp and also that it might put together messenger, Instagram and whatsapp within one up making it a more cohesive ecosystem.
It feels like Facebook might actually make whatsapp a paid service with ads coming in 2020 and Facebook might just offer an ad-free version for a few bucks to earn some side cash. With facebook under scrutiny for selling user data, this might be a new philosophy that the tech giant might be adopting. This might be paving the way for Facebook itself to become a paid service. However, only one of the thing is confirmed uptil now and that is that Whatsapp ads is coming to status feature of the app in 2020. We have one year of enjoying Whatsapp add-free but for those who aren’t into whatsapp statuses will have the same experience. This might be a good timeframe to find an alternate messaging service with the latest developments.
In the past, such changes have caused public outcry put limiting the ads to statuses only would not be a bigger deal. It is entirely possible that it is the first step towards integrating ads throughout Whatsapp which might be a bigger deal, but lets wait until then to make our decisions.
