Latest news with #JanKoum
Forbes
an hour ago
- Business
- Forbes
WhatsApp Adverts Have Arrived—Is It Time To Switch To Signal?
What's going on with ads in WhatsApp, what does it mean for your privacy and should you switch to ... More Signal instead? dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images 'No ads, no games, no gimmicks.' This was the ethos of WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum. Yet 11 years after its acquisition by Meta, WhatsApp is finally doing what it said it'd never do — adverts inside the app. The new move by WhatsApp's owner Meta has been criticised by NOYB – European Center for Digital Rights, a non-profit organization based in Vienna. 'This further integrates WhatsApp into other Meta services — an originally independent app, which initially was available for just $1 per year without ads or data usage,' the organization said. WhatsApp has already been under fire for its blue circle AI, something users did not want or ask for. So what's going on with ads in WhatsApp, what does it mean for your privacy and should you switch to Signal instead? I Thought WhatsApp Promised No Ads? WhatsApp did promise no ads, but the Meta-owned app offers its services for free, which is why it has decided to start showing some limited advertising in certain sections. And the ads in WhatsApp won't appear in your messages or chats. Instead of appearing in the Chats tab, they will appear in a section at the bottom of the messaging app in a new section called 'Updates.' Businesses can promote ads in this space in a bid to gain followers for their channels or subscriber content. They can also advertise via a status update that looks similar to an Instagram story, according to the BBC. WhatsApp owner Meta has been advertising the privacy credentials of its messaging platform, and it reiterates this on a page explaining its ads decision. Using Meta ad preferences to show ads on WhatsApp is completely optional and off by default, it says. If users don't add their WhatsApp account to Account Center, Meta is using limited information to show ads on the Updates tab. That includes info like your country or city, language, the Channels you're following, and how you interact with the ads you see — which all comes from WhatsApp. However, if you link your WhatsApp account to facebook or Instagram, the ads are personalized using your data. WhatsApp owner Meta says it doesn't use the content of your personal messages, calls, and status, location shared in chats, your device contacts or your membership in groups with friends and family to show you ads. It does not sell or share your phone number with advertisers. Meanwhile, it stresses that it does not keep logs of who everyone is messaging, and your personal messages, calls and status remain end-to-end encrypted, the gold standard of security that ensures no one can see your messages, including WhatsApp. WhatsApp says it has 'no plans' to put ads in people's personal chats. What Do WhatsApp Ads Mean For Privacy? Meta is not known for its privacy credentials. After all, it runs Facebook, which is free but involves you sharing a lot of data. 'If you're not paying for the product, you are the product,' says Alan Jones, CEO, YEO Messaging, which is a competitor of WhatsApp . He says the new WhatsApp advertising model will 'use behaviour, language, location and channel-following data to deliver targeted ads.' Meta claims personal chats will remain ad-free, but that's a 'red herring,' Jones says. 'The real value lies in the metadata — what users read, follow, or click.' Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, says WhatsApp's new move looks fine on the surface, but users should be cautious all the same. 'The ads look set to be neatly confined and encrypted chats will stay untouched, plus user experience looks set to remain unaffected for most.' However, he questions: 'How exactly will the limited data targeting look like in practice? 'And could we see gradual expansion of those data sources?' Moore asks. 'We know that micro targeted advertising is where the money really is.' With this in mind, Moore advises WhatsApp users to 'keep an eye on consent settings and as they change or update in the future.' While WhatsApp claims the new ads will be minimal and focused on just one tab, it raises several privacy concerns, according to ad blocking app AdGuard. 'Specifically, the potential for increased data collection and tracking, combined with the lack of any opt-out option, could significantly impact user privacy.' While WhatsApp assures users that it won't target ads based on private messages, calls, or group activity, if you've integrated WhatsApp with Meta's Accounts Center (e.g., by linking it to Facebook or Instagram), the company can use your ad preferences and behavior across its entire ecosystem to deliver more targeted ads, Adguard warns. WhatsApp Ads — Should You Switch To Signal? Meta's move to add ads in WhatsApp is certainly a concern for privacy-conscious users, mainly because of the precedent it could set for the future. WhatsApp says it won't ever use your chats for adverts, but remember, it is owned by a firm whose business model is based on advertising. Privacy-focused messaging app Signal is a viable alternative — it is also end-to-end encrypted, just not owned by Meta. However, it doesn't have WhatsApp's 1.5 billion user share. I use Signal as much as possible, but many of my contacts aren't signed up. If you're in a similar position, then for now, it might make sense to use it for your most private chats and for general messaging, stick to WhatsApp.
CNA
17 hours ago
- Business
- CNA
Commentary: WhatsApp's ‘no ads' promise meets Meta's reality
LONDON: It's hard to think of a more extraordinary business deal than Facebook's US$19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in February 2014. Its creators were outliers. With a lean staff of just a few dozen people, they had no marketing department, no sign on the door, and had spent zero cents from their sole investor, Sequoia Capital. But WhatsApp had 450 million users, mostly outside the US. Founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton also hated ads. They'd spent a combined 20 years working at Yahoo, bonding over their frustration with a business model that sucked up personal data to show us pop-ups. Building ad systems was 'depressing', Koum told me in an interview in mid-2014. But not too depressing to sell their chat service to online ad magnate Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms, just a few months later. Eight of WhatsApp's roughly 50 employees made more than US$100 million off that deal, while Koum gained a net worth of US$6.8 billion. This week, just over a decade later, ads are finally coming to WhatsApp. They'll appear in its Updates (formerly Status) tab, where users post images and videos. Advertisers will also be able to promote Channels there and collect thousands of followers. Meta described the rollout as 'gradual', suggesting WhatsApp users will start to see ads over the coming weeks and months. "THIS TIME IT'S FOR REAL" Zuckerberg has long been under pressure to monetise WhatsApp, a prominent cash sink whose user base has soared to more than 3 billion but which has yet to pay its own way. Now, with Meta's costly push into artificial intelligence (AI), including a US$14.3 billion investment in data labelling startup Scale AI, the company is moving on the last big piece of real estate it can squeeze cash from. (Meta had already begun monetising WhatsApp through business messaging tools and click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram, but this is the first time ads are appearing inside WhatsApp itself.) Ads fly in the face of what WhatsApp's founders wanted. For a few years after his extraordinary sale, Koum resisted efforts inside Facebook to feature ads on WhatsApp, his co-founder Acton later told me, while Acton himself tried to convince Sheryl Sandberg, then the company's chief operating officer, to introduce a metered-user model. His idea was to charge users a tiny amount, perhaps a tenth of a cent, after a certain large number of free messages were expended and monetise WhatsApp that way. Sandberg stuck by the ad model that already allowed Facebook to print money for years, telling Acton that his idea wouldn't scale. By the time he left the company, Acton knew that he couldn't stop the inevitable. 'At the end of the day, I sold my company,' he said. Still, both internal and public resistance to ads has been enough to make Meta's monetisation plans for WhatsApp a fitful journey over the last decade. Meta's chief marketing officer, Alex Schultz, admitted on LinkedIn that the company had announced ads a few times already. 'This time it's for real,' he added. TECH'S PUREST IDEALS Meta first publicly announced its intention to bring ads to WhatsApp Status in November 2018, then put the plans on hold and nixed them in 2020, before announcing in 2023 that the rollout was back on. The U-turns are down to the staunch views of WhatsApp's founders, who infused company culture even after they vested their stock options and left Meta. WhatsApp users are also accustomed to a clean, ad-free app that keeps their conversations private with end-to-end encryption. When the company tweaked its privacy terms in 2021 to add more business-messaging features, many ditched it for rival apps like Signal and Telegram. Meta had to move slowly. Now it's trying to make up for lost time. It will target ads based on users' country or city, channels they follow and how they interact with ads they see on Status or on sister apps Facebook and Instagram if their accounts are linked. That's less invasive than the targeting done on Facebook or Instagram, but it's still a form of clutter that WhatsApp's founders abhorred. And Zuckerberg could still push for deeper insights as revenue from Status starts to pour in. According to Schultz, 1.5 billion users visit the feature everyday. Meta's investors can rest easy knowing the company has yet another platform to capitalise on as Zuckerberg spends heavily on AI. The rest of us have yet another reminder that tech's most important visionaries can sometimes be as naive as they are idealistic. Sam Altman's efforts to start OpenAI as a nonprofit that lived off donations from benevolent billionaires was arguably a pipe dream, hence his eventual partnership with Microsoft. DeepMind's Demis Hassabis spent years trying to break away from Alphabet's Google, believing the search giant would be willing to spin off a valuable AI lab after spending US$650 million on it. In the end, he was wrong and his company was drawn deeper into Google. Koum and Acton were similarly guileless to think they could sell WhatsApp to one of the world's biggest advertising businesses and avoid ads. Of course, US$19 billion can make even the purest ideals go quiet. In the end, money talks.
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
WhatsApp's ‘No Ads' Promise Meets Meta's Reality
It's hard to think of a more extraordinary business deal than Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in February 2014. Its creators were outliers. With a lean staff of just a few dozen people, they had no marketing department, no sign on the door, and had spent zero cents from their sole investor, Sequoia Capital. But WhatsApp had 450 million users, mostly outside the US. Founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton also hated ads. They'd spent a combined 20 years working at Yahoo! Inc. bonding over their frustration with a business model that sucked up personal data to show us pop-ups. Building ad systems was 'depressing,' Koum told me in an interview in mid-2014. But not too depressing to sell their chat service to online ad magnate Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., just a few months later. Eight of WhatsApp's roughly 50 employees made more than $100 million off that deal, while Koum gained a net worth of $6.8 billion.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Veteran portfolio manager raises eyebrows with latest Meta Platforms move
Veteran portfolio manager raises eyebrows with latest Meta Platforms move originally appeared on TheStreet. On Feb. 19, 2014, big things were happening, both in the sky and on the ground. Overheard, a minor geomagnetic storm was already in progress when a coronal mass ejection, or CME, struck Earth's magnetic field. 💵💰Don't miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet's free daily newsletter 💰 Meanwhile, back on Earth, Facebook said it was making its biggest acquisition of all time. The social-media giant, which changed its name to Meta Platforms () seven years later, was buying WhatsApp, the cross-platform messaging and calling app, for $19 billion. The deal was more than 20 times larger than Facebook's 2012 purchase of Instagram, and at the time it was the largest acquisition of a venture-capital-backed company in history. "WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO. "The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable." WhatsApp had been founded in February 2009 by two former Yahoo employees, Brian Acton and Jan Koum. When early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Koum considered giving up and looking for a new job, Acton encouraged him to wait a "few more months." Good idea because by 2015 WhatsApp would become the world's most popular messaging application. By February 2020 it had more than 2 billion users worldwide and by 2023 WhatsApp Business had roughly 200 million monthly users. Both Acton and Koum, whose motto had been 'No ads, no games, no gimmicks,' left the company seven years ago. More Tech Stocks: Palantir gets great news from the Pentagon Analyst has blunt words on Trump's iPhone tariff plans OpenAI teams up with legendary Apple exec And what's up with WhatsApp now? Well, on June 16 Meta said businesses would now be able to run status ads on WhatsApp that prompt users to interact with the advertisers via the app's messaging features. The ads will be shown only to users within WhatsApp's Updates tab, to separate the promotions from people's personal conversations. Businesses with channels will be able to choose to promote ads in the Updates section to attract new followers, and also charge a subscription to access extra content. WhatsApp will eventually take a 10% commission of that fee, the BBC reported, and there may also be extra costs on top of that taken at the app store level depending on the size of the business. "We've been talking for years about how to build a business on WhatsApp in a way that doesn't interrupt personal chats, and we believe the Updates tab is the right place to introduce that," Meta said in a statement. Meta will begin monetizing WhatsApp's Channels feature through search ads and subscriptions. "Like everything else on WhatsApp, we've built these features in the most privacy-oriented way possible," the company said. "Your personal messages, calls and statuses remain end-to-end encrypted, meaning no one can see or hear them. That includes Meta." Meta is currently locked in a legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission, which alleges that the company's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were part of a strategy to eliminate competition and maintain a monopoly in the social media market. TheStreet Pro's Chris Versace sees a pattern in Meta's latest move with WhatsApp. "We know that when the company changed its name from Facebook to Meta, [we] were going to see the management team lean into other businesses, whether it was Instagram or some of the things that it's doing in the wearables, whether it's Oculus or the Ray-Ban glasses," the lead manager for TheStreet Pro Portfolio said."Now, we're seeing that CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to integrate online ads into WhatsApp," he noted. Versace said this was a very strong move for the social media giant, pointing to the company's effort to monetize Instagram. "According to Statista, WhatsApp had over 3 billion monthly active users in March," Versace said. "So if this is successful, and there's reason to think that it will be, it will be another growth driver for the company and its bottom line, and a positive catalyst for the shares. As we see signs of this happening, we will look to revisit our Meta price target." Versace's current price target on META is $725. Opinions about the WhatsApp plan varied on social media. Great to see them finally rolling out ads," one poster said on X. "Whatsapp is one of the greatest products ever. It isn't free to run it. Ads continue to be the greatest leveler to ever exist for billions of people High income people in rich countries will get on high horse about ads but who cares." "Sorry buddy, this is textbook enshitification," one person responded. Shares of Meta Platforms finished regular trading June 16 up 2.9% at $702. The stock has climbed about 40% from last year and is up almost 20% in 2025. On June 16 Oppenheimer boosted its price target on Meta Platforms to $775 from $665 and affirmed an outperform rating on the shares. With the macroeconomic and advertising environment better than feared vs. six weeks ago, the investment firm is increasing its earnings estimates and price target. A "TikTok Q1 tailwind is potential near-term risk, assuming no ban, while longer-term risk is Meta falling behind on AI model development," Oppenheimer added, quoted by portfolio manager raises eyebrows with latest Meta Platforms move first appeared on TheStreet on Jun 17, 2025 This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jun 17, 2025, where it first appeared. Sign in to access your portfolio
Time of India
2 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Meta brings ads to WhatsApp
WhatsApp said Monday that users will start seeing ads in parts of the app, as owner Meta Platforms moves to cultivate a new revenue stream by tapping the billions of people that use the messaging service. Advertisements will be shown only in the app's Updates tab, which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day. However, they won't appear where personal chats are located, developers said. "The personal messaging experience on WhatsApp isn't changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads," WhatsApp said in a blog post. It's a big change for the company, whose founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton vowed to keep the platform free of ads when they created it in 2009. Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014 and the pair left a few years later. Parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has long been trying to generate revenue from WhatsApp. WhatsApp said ads will be targeted to users based on information like their age, the country or city where they're located, the language they're using, the channels they're following in the app, and how they're interacting with the ads they see. WhatsApp said it won't use personal messages, calls and groups that a user is a member of to target ads to the user. It's one of three advertising features that WhatsApp unveiled on Monday as it tries to monetize the app's user base. Channels will also be able to charge users a monthly fee for subscriptions so they can get exclusive updates. And business owners will be able to pay to promote their channel's visibility to new users. Most of Meta's revenue comes from ads. In 2025, the Menlo Park, California-based company's revenue totaled $164.5 billion and $160.6 billion of it came from advertising.
