On Monday, Meta announced that ads will officially be coming to WhatsApp later this year. Despite the original founders of the messaging app saying ads would never be available on the platform, things have changed a great deal over the past decade. 

With Meta as owner, and over 3 billion monthly active users on WhatsApp, it’s hardly surprising that the social behemoth has finally succumbed to its revenue generation potential. Meta paid $19bn for the app in 2014 and, well, it probably wants to recoup some of that money…

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Why now?

About 18 months ago, Meta launched an Updates tab – a section of the messaging app separate from users’ daily conversations. It’s more like a standard broadcast channel, which enables brands and content creators to share content. It also has a Status section - WhatsApp’s version of Stories – which disappear after 24 hours, like Instagram. 

According to Meta, 1.5 billion people use the Status section daily making it the most used ‘Stories’ product in the world. If that’s true, then it’s a no-brainer that it would want to monetise it – and give brands a chance to market to this huge audience. 

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What else?

But WhatsApp isn’t stopping at ads alone. It’s also going to let users pay monthly subscription fees to Channels for exclusive creator content. Some Channels can also pay to be promoted in feeds of different accounts.

For brands and creators this represents a great opportunity to get in front of new and existing audiences. 

While UK audiences might be a little un-phased by this (who here regularly clicks the Updates tab?), it’s clearly an emerging trend to use other parts of the app besides the normal DMs. The biggest Channels are Real Madrid C.F. (64.2m followers), FC Barcelona (49.8m followers) and Netflix (31.6m followers). That’s a lot of eyeballs. 

And media are popular, too, with CNN, BBC News and The New York Times all having more than 10m followers. 

Interestingly, you don’t have to be a huge Channel to stand out. The three most active are currently Jellycat (108k followers), Here & Queer (4k followers) and Daily TikToks (37k followers). 

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Why should brands pay attention?

Social media users are increasingly retreating from public feeds and moving to dark or private networks. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said only last year that DMs and sends/shares is the most popular format on the app. 

WhatsApp is the second most used social platform in the world, but has yet to truly monetise it. If it can strike a balance between keeping private messages and conversations separate from the paid side of things, without causing a backlash, it could deliver the best of both worlds. 

No dates have been announced yet for the gradual rollout, but expect things to move quickly over the next few months. There will be opportunities to stand out through innovating with formats, use cases and getting in early to test and learn. 

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