New Delhi: The popular social media platform, WhatsApp, has finally found a place to put in advertisements. After months of deliberations Facebook owned WhatsApp on Wednesday announced that there will be ads placed inside Status section of its free service.
"We will be putting ads in 'Status'. That is going to be primary monetization mode for the company as well as an opportunity for businesses to reach people on WhatsApp," WhatsApp Vice President Chris Daniels said while speaking at an event in New Delhi.
Facebook's plan to monetise WhatsApp have long been in news. In fact, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton who made his exit from the company last year recently revealed that Facebook had plans to put ads inside WhatsApp even before its acquisition.
In August this year, David Fisher, Facebook's vice president of business and marketing partnerships, had said that WhatsApp was planning to bring ads to the platform but he did not reveal how or where ads will be placed.
WhatsApp Status was launched in 2017 as a knockoff of the Stories feature found in Instagram and Snapchat. The feature has since become so popular that it even surpassed Snapchat usage.
WhatsApp Status feature allows users to add text, photos, and videos to their profile, which are encrypted in the same way as messages. Status updates are visible to users' contacts for 24 hours before disappearing.
Daniels did not give any specific date of integrating ads to WhatsApp. But speculations are rife that the feature may be introduced in early 2019.
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