WhatsApp’s senior executive on Friday refuted a Financial Times report that said the messaging service was looking at advertising as a way to increase revenue.
“This @FT story is false. We aren’t doing this,” Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, stated this in a post on social networking site X, formerly known as Twitter.
According to the report, Meta is debating whether to display advertisements in contact discussion lists on the WhatsApp chat screen, but no decisions had been taken as of yet.
Also, Meta was also considering whether to charge a membership fee for ad-free access to the app.
“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 said in a statement to the Financial Times.
Many corporate executives, according to FT, were opposed to the change.
In 2014, Facebook paid $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, a chat programme that has always been available for free.
The goal of Meta has already been to increase WhatsApp revenue. Business communications “probably going to be the next major pillar” of Meta’s business, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction made last year that WhatsApp and Messenger would propel the company’s next wave of sales development.
As of June of this year, WhatsApp’s Business application served more than 200 million users on its network, a four-fold increase from around three years earlier.
