WhatsApp introduces advertising
"No advertising": Eleven years after the sale to Meta, the mantra of WhatsApp's founders is history. There are now adverts in the messenger app.
Slight all-clear beforehand: Those who only use WhatsApp for chats will also be able to get away without adverts in the future. Meta only wants to display these in the status messages in the tab «News». This should be very similar to advertising in Instagram and Facebook stories.
Advertising in the latest section of Messenger
According to Meta, 1.5 billion people currently use the News tab every day. With this reach, the company now wants to help Geld verdienen « admins, organisations and companies to grow on WhatsApp», according to the official announcement. There are three options for growth:
There will still be no adverts on the WhatsApp homepage or in chats. According to Meta, anyone who does not click on the News tab will not see any adverts.
End-to-end encryption to remain untouched
Meta also makes it clear that it will never share «phone numbers» with advertisers or sell them to them. In addition, «personal messages, calls and groups» will not be used to select adverts.
The advert at least has the potential to make some people switch to other messengers such as Threema or Signal. However, similar waves following critical decisions by Meta regarding WhatsApp have failed to have a lasting impact in the past.
As a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus.
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