- WhatsApp’s co-founder boycotts ads The app has been many years, including after the company acquired the company for $22 billion in 2014. BrianActon and Jan Koum left the company in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and launched an ad for the Status feature on Monday, with the Status feature in the Updates tab and the sponsored channels.
WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton never want to include ads in their messaging platform, but new owner Meta stepped forward on Monday and planned to do so.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which purchased WhatsApp in 2014 explain On Monday, it will introduce the ad in the app’s Updates tab, which the company says has 1.5 billion users per day. The Show Status feature shows disappearing photos or videos, which will now contain ads like Instagram Stories, and advertisers can now pay to enhance their WhatsApp channel. The company said in a blog post that people and companies running their own channels will also be able to sell subscriptions to their content.
The new advertising feature is the opposite of what the co-founder of WhatsApp is. When Koum and Acton first launched the app in 2009 after resigning at Yahoo!, the two actively resisted their previous bad experiences and added ads. Instead, they charge users $1 a year for free to use the service after a year.
Sequoia Capital partner Jim Goetz said former Coom CEO Koum reportedly wrote Acton’s notes on his desk to remind him of the company’s mission.
“Jan kept Brian’s recording notes that read “No ads! No games! No head! “It reminds them every day to focus on building pure messaging experiences.” Goetz in 2014 Blog Posts.
When Koum and Acton sell the company to Meta (and then Facebook) 22 billion US dollars in 2014, Goetz wrote in a blog post that Meta assured them that this would make WhatsApp irrelevant and that the two would not have to compromise on their principles. In their own blog posts, the co-founders also promise “absolutely no ads to interrupt your communication”, Washington Post Report In 2018.
Nevertheless, the co-founder of WhatsApp reportedly clashed with Meta’s leadership that monetized WhatsApp. Acton and Koum left WhatsApp in 2017 and 2018, respectively, putting long-term pressure on WhatsApp to share more data with Facebook and the driving force of Meta, and including ads in WhatsApp.
Acton said in an interview in 2019 Forbes The META plan to include ads in WhatsApp’s status feature, breaking the social contract with app users. “I was upset by targeted advertising,” he said.
Acton said when Acton proposed an alternative to advertising on WhatsApp, which included messages sent after charging users for free messages, the company’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg turned him down because it wouldn’t expand.
“I’ll tell her to go out at once,” Acton told Forbes. “I was like, ‘No, you’re not saying it won’t expand. You mean, it won’t make…’, she’s a little stuck, a little stuck. We keep going. I think I pointed out what I mean… They’re businessmen, they’re businessmen, they’re a good business.
A Meta spokesperson said in a statement wealth The company has been talking about incorporating ads into WhatsApp for years, adding that the new ad feature does not interrupt users’ chats.
“We think it reflects the way people want to use WhatsApp, and if you’re just sending personal messages to friends and family, nothing has changed,” the spokesperson said.
This story was originally fortune.com
