WhatsApp Introducing Ads in Status Updates Next Year, Here’s an Early Look

At the annual Facebook Marketing Summit (FMS) in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Facebook announced and gave an early preview of WhatsApp Status updates which will start showing ads starting next year.

Thanks to Olivier Ponteville, media head at a digital marketing agency based out of Brussels, we now have an early preview of how this feature is going to look like. The new feature will work pretty much like Instagram where advertisements will be shown between WhatsApp stories. Stories would completely stretch across your screen and will have a link to redirect users to the related website.

Introduced on February 24, 2017, the Status feature is similar to Instagram and Facebook stories. We had heard about Facebook’s plan of bringing adverts to WhatsApp stories late last year. While it follows a similar model as Instagram, we are not sure how successful this feature could be. Clearly, the advert feature will be aimed at users who want to expand their business and services, and could be powered by Facebook's native advertising system.

A few days back Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of Telegram, launched a scathing attack on the Facebook-owned messaging app saying that every time WhatsApp has to fix a critical vulnerability in their app, a new one seems to appear in its place. He also said, "All of their security issues are conveniently suitable for surveillance, and look and work a lot like backdoors.”