WhatsApp and Advertising

From the WhatsApp Blog

These new features will appear only on the Updates tab, away from your personal chats. This means if you only use WhatsApp to chat with friends and loved ones there is no change to your experience at all.

I’m not someone who has a principled objection to targeted advertising as a method of monetising a product, but you’d have to be naive in the extreme to take this statement at face value. Once Meta taps into a new way to generate revenue they will suck that well dry, and WhatsApp will be no different. It will start as an experiment, then a new normal, and then every surface which performs well will be fair game.

Meta is world class at boiling us all like frogs when it comes to new ad surfaces.