WhatsApp ads coming in 2020

Popular cross platform instant messaging app WhatsApp has confirmed that adverts will be coming in 2020. WhatsApp ads will be a part of 'Statuses.’

The company announced WhatsApp ads at the Facebook's annual Facebook Marketing Summit in the Netherlands, wherein slides depicting ads were presented to the media and the attendees.

Similar to the Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Statuses fill up the entire screen when you want to view them. WhatsApp allows you to share text, photos, videos and GIFs to Status. The Status are ephemeral in nature meaning they disappear after 24 hours.

The slides at the event show WhatsApp ads taking up phone’s entire screen as you click through your friends' Statuses. However, rather than showing contact name of the person who shared the Status, there will be a company name behind the advert.

According to the media reports, you can swipe up to see more information about the product or service being advertised.

Once rolled out, the WhatsApp ads could be powered by Facebook's native advertising system to make users participate in businesses using the messaging app.

Whether or not users of WhatsApp will like the ads interfering with their time while they are scrolling through Statuses, is yet to be seen. WhatsApp main USP is its end to end encryption technique, but if Facebook which is constantly hungry of user data ends up harvesting that data too, WhatsApp would not be as friendly as it is presently.

WhatsApp recently discovered a vulnerability on its voice call service that exposed billions of users globally. The vulnerability allowed a spyware to be installed automatically, even if you had not answered a call, and can gain access to user’s call data, photos, etc. The spyware is said to be developed by the Israeli cyber intelligence company NSO Group.

While WhatsApp is still investigating the issue, the company in the meantime has rolled out an update globally to secure its servers and an update to fix this issue.