Facebook To Delay Plans To Serve Ads On WhatsApp

Facebook is delaying its plan to sell ad placements on WhatsApp, the messaging platform it owns. As uncovered by The Wall Street Journal, the team in charge of putting ads in the app has been broken up and their work was removed from WhatsApp in the last few months.

However, Facebook does not seem to abandon its goal to show ads in the Status feature of WhatsApp; for now, users of the app can still enjoy an ad-free experience.

The company behind the world’s largest social media platform acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for $22 billion and it has always wanted to monetize it, which was the main reason why Jan Koun, a co-founder of the app left Facebook four years later.

Another co-founder Brian Acton departed months before him over a similar issue related to privacy and advertising. Ever since he left, Acton has been quite vocal about his approval of Facebook having too much power without proper supervision.

The setback over advertising has forced Facebook to follow another path of focusing on allowing businesses to better communicate with their customers as well as organize the contacts.

One of Acton’s and Koun’s concerns is that a messaging feature for commercial purposes will affect the end-to-end encryption protecting WhatsApp.

However, things changed last year after Mark Zuckerberg announced a gradual shift to a messaging system across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, from public posts. Of course, the content will be protected by encryption.

This plan is devised after the company realized that it would encounter lots of obstacles trying to serve ads on an encrypted service.

>>> How To Recover Deleted Whatsapp Messages