Facebook-acquired WhatsApp to have 'No ads, No games, No gimmicks'

Facebook announced its plans to acquire popular messaging service WhatsApp and immediately investors and users were concerned if the next move would be to bring ads to the platform.

Putting concerns to rest, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said that the 19 billion dollars deal doesn't mean there would be ads on the platform.

According to Mashable, both Koum and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have pledged to hold true to the 'No Ad' rule.

Koum said that for WhatsApp, advertising is not necessarily the right way to go, adding that they have a very solid monetization system in place, hinting to its current strategy of charging users 0.99 dollars subscription fee after their first year for each additional year that users remain on the service.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg also insisted that Facebook has no plans to introduce ads on WhatsApp and that ads were not the right way to monetize and the focus would be on helping the service continue to scale up.

An analyst with Sterne Agee, Arvind Bhatia, believes that Facebook might actually allow WhatsApp to delay various monetization efforts, including ads, by giving it the resources needed to grow without having to ramp up revenue first.