Are ads coming to your WhatsApp chats soon? Here's what Meta says

The Menlo Park-based company has been trying to improve its revenue as investors are concerned about the company's bet on virtual reality and the 'metaverse'

With its parent company, Meta, working to shore up its advertising revenue, WhatsApp has been introducing various changes to its mobile application. According to a recent report by The Financial Times (FT), the tech giant is exploring a new feature that will display ads with contacts on the chat screen.

The report added that the deliberations are ongoing, but no final decision has been made. Moreover, the company is also exploring if it can charge a subscription fee to use the app ad-free.

The Menlo Park-based company has been trying to improve its revenue as investors are concerned about its bet on virtual reality and "metaverse". It has also slashed tens of thousands of jobs to improve its outlook.

If the new feature is launched, the app users will see ads next to the chats with friends and other contacts, FT added. The ads are unlikely to be shown inside the chat. The interface would look similar to how adverts are interspersed among chats in Facebook Messenger and emails in Gmail.

But are ads really coming to WhatsApp?

Soon after the story was out, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart took to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and said that the company is not working on this.

"This @FT story is false. We aren't doing this," he wrote in a post.

 

In a statement, WhatsApp told the FT that "we can't account for every conversation someone had in our company but we are not testing this, working on it, and it's not our plan at all."

WhatsApp's Business application catered to more than 200 million users on its platform as of June this year, a four-fold jump from about three years ago.