Instant messaging app WhatsApp will start serving advertisements in 2020. According to reports, at the Facebook Marketing Summit in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the announcement about WhatsApp was made. It has also been said that the ads will at first appear in the WhatsApp Status feature, much like they do on Instagram Stories. It is worth noticing that there have been several reports this year which had claimed that WhatsApp Status feature will be getting ads. WhatsApp ads will be made available on Status Section of its Android as well as iOS versions of the app.
We should mention that the announcement has not been made via WhatsApp or Facebook though. BeConnectAgency’s Olivier Ponteville, who was present at a session of the ongoing Facebook Marketing Summit in Rotterdam, made the announcement about WhatsApp ads. An image was also shown at the summit which showed the presentation slide that showed what ads will look like on the instant messaging app. What adds more weight to the news is that the development about WhatsApp was also later shared by social media guru Matt Navarra.
According to the demo at the summit, ads on WhatsApp will cover the entire screen and will come with a link that users will be able to go to after they swipe the screen. As we mentioned, they work a lot like the ads that we have seen on Instagram Stories. We should also mention that vice-president Chris Daniels also confirmed recently that the instant messaging app will be using its Status feature to showcase ads to its users.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal that appeared last year and cited some officials from WhatsApp, the Status feature was supposed to showcase ads in 2019 itself. It is worth adding that WhatsApp beta version 2.18.305 for Android reportedly comes with the implementation of ads in its Status feature. The iPhone version of WhatsApp was also said to have the development for advertisements. However, these changes are not visible to users as yet because even in beta versions, they have not been made active yet.
Besides this, WhatsApp will also be improving the experience for those who use the enterprise version of its app. At the summit, it was also announced that WhatsApp Business will soon be getting “richer message formats” to let users share images and PDF files via the app. The product catalogue on WhatsApp is claimed to be integrated within the existing Facebook Business Manager catalogue.
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