WhatsApp starts including ads, but not in personal chats

Madrid.- WhatsApp is launching new features in its news tab, with the possibility of including ads in the status section, paid channel subscriptions, and promoted channels. Changes that will not affect users who only use this network to chat with their contacts. WhatsApp, owned by Meta, created the news tab a year and a half ago, which opens the door to optional experiences, such as statuses and channels, beyond chatting with the user's contacts.

This tab, which is used every day by 1.5 billion people and is where people go to "discover something new on WhatsApp," is the one that will host the new features, said Meta's head of business messaging, Nikila Srinivasan, in a virtual meeting with journalists.

These features will be a global launch that will be "gradually advancing in the coming months," Srinivasan highlighted. Within the channels, which messaging activated a little over a year ago and allow, for example, companies to disseminate messages to large audiences, promoted channels will now emerge.

The goal is to "help people discover new channels that might be of interest to them and give administrators the ability to promote some of their channels in the directory to help attract new followers and gain wider distribution of their content," he explained.

In addition, the possibility of paid subscriptions to channels opens up, whose owners "will be able to share exclusive updates in the moment with their most committed followers". The third new feature refers to statuses, similar to Instagram 'stories', which are used to share photos, videos, voice notes, and text with common contacts and last for 24 hours. Now, channels and companies will be able to pay to appear in statuses, "so that a conversation on WhatsApp about a product or service can be easily started," added Srinivasan.

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Meta's head emphasized that personal messages, calls, and statuses remain end-to-end encrypted, so no one, except the recipient, can see or hear them, and they are not used to display ads or inform about what users see. In this regard, he explained that to display ads in the channels and status sections, they will rely on "basic information" such as the country or city code and the device language, as well as information about the user's activity in the news feed (for example, the channels being followed). Also, if the user has decided to use Meta's Accounts Center for the rest of their applications from that company, such as Instagram or Facebook, their ad preferences will be applied. The new features, Srinivasan emphasized, will only be in the news tab and separate from personal chats, so if the user "only uses WhatsApp for personal messaging, they will not see the new features and they will not be affected."