WhatsApp said Monday that 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鈥檚 Updates tab, which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day. However, they won鈥檛 appear where personal chats are located, developers said.
鈥淭he personal messaging experience on WhatsApp isn鈥檛 changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads,鈥� WhatsApp said in a blog post.
It鈥檚 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.
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.
WhatsApp said ads will be targeted to users based on information like their age, the country or city where they鈥檙e located, the language they鈥檙e using, the channels they鈥檙e following in the app, and how they鈥檙e interacting with the ads they see.
WhatsApp said it won鈥檛 use personal messages, calls and groups that a user is a member of to target ads to the user.
It鈥檚 one of three advertising features that WhatsApp unveiled on Monday as it tries to monetize the app鈥檚 user base. Channels will also be able to charge users a monthly fee for subscriptions so they can get exclusive updates. And business owners will be able to pay to promote their channel鈥檚 visibility to new users.
Most of Meta鈥檚 revenue comes from ads. In 2025, the Menlo Park, California-based company鈥檚 revenue totaled $164.5 billion and $160.6 billion of it came from advertising.