For the longest time ever, many were wondering how Facebook planned on making money from WhatsApp. Considering how much money Facebook paid for WhatsApp, obviously Facebook would like to recover their investment. Recently Facebook’s plans to start monetizing WhatsApp was revealed, and now more details have surfaced.
In a report from The Wall Street Journal (via 9to5Mac), it seems that one of the ways Facebook will monetize WhatsApp will be through ads. The previous report did mention ads but the WSJ’s report reveals that these ads will start showing up in the Status section of WhatsApp. As you might know, following the success of Instagram Stories, Facebook decided to take that feature and apply it to Facebook and WhatsApp as well.
Instagram already displays ads in its Stories so it makes sense that WhatsApp’s Status could do the same as well. However the question is how many people will actually check these Statuses? It is safe to say that the engagement levels of the Status feature on WhatsApp is different from that of Instagram, so we’re not sure how effective it will be.
In any we suppose only time will tell whether or not this plan will work out, but hopefully it won’t be too intrusive otherwise we wouldn’t be surprised if users started jumping ship to other platforms such as Telegram.