One of the most controversial announcements of last year came from Facebook’s developer conference F8. This was when Facebook said that they are planning to integrate ads inside its applications.
However, an internal meeting or a briefing revealed that the company was planning to add ads inside WhatsApp’s Status feature. If you are a long-time user of WhatsApp, you would know that the company’s developers were strictly against the idea of adding advertisements inside WhatsApp.
They had said that the app would remain free to use as well as no ads will be ever integrated inside their platform. However, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook from many years but the developers quit their own app due to concerns over how Facebook was handling it.
This means that Facebook now has complete control over the working of WhatsApp. This means that the company which relies on ads for monetization revealed their plans to have ads inside WhatsApp too.
However, this would mean that they were going against the reason why WhatsApp became popular. Nonetheless, we have good news as it is reported that the company has scrapped its plans to integrate ads inside WhatsApp.
It is also being said that the team which was working on integrating ads inside WhatsApp has also been dispersed and assigned to different roles. Apart from that, the code to integrate ads inside WhatsApp has also been removed from the app as found out by reverse engineering experts.
Now, we feel that this is a step in the right direction from Facebook regarding WhatsApp. There is nothing wrong in finding a way to monetize 1 billion+ users on WhatsApp but the company needs to find a way which does not hinder the user experience.
Instead of ads, we feel that Facebook should add some subscription inside the app to monetize it better. For instance, there could be some features hidden behind a paywall which the users can unlock while still retaining the core functionality of WhatsApp.