WhatsApp will roll out ads on status in the next few months globally. Businesses will soon have an option to select WhatsApp status for ads as they would for other Meta campaigns on Facebook or Instagram.

“It’s going to be a global launch, and it will be starting over the next couple of months. I can’t share the specific timeline per country. I should say it will be a slow rollout,” said Alice Newton-Rex, V-P product at WhatsApp. Personal messages, calls and statuses remain end-to-end encrypted, said the company in a press release.

According to Newton-Rex, businesses have requested for ads on WhatsApp for a long time. Now, both big and small businesses can come to Ads Manager and choose to take out these ads and set their own budget to pay for the ads.

“It will operate via the auction system. It should feel similar to businesses of any size taking ads on Facebook or Instagram. Each ad is reviewed at the ad level rather than the advertiser,” said Newton-Rex.

To show ads in the Updates tab, WhatsApp will use location data such as country or city, language, the channels you’re following, and user’s interaction with the ads they see. For people that have chosen to add WhatsApp to Accounts Centre, the platform will use ad preferences and information across Meta accounts.

Privacy threat

Sharing their initial inputs, legal and privacy experts on anonymity said they did not see any immediate privacy threat. One expert said that the ads feature will not be a concern as long as the platform’s end-to-end encryption is not changed. Another expert said location data can be considered personal data but since India’s data protection law is yet to come into force, the platform is not obligated to take consent from users. As of now, they can go ahead and use the data.

One expert even said that it’s good for a service like WhatsApp to have a revenue stream as long as it isn’t based on virality since it can incentivise hate speech and so on.

Aside from ads, WhatsApp is also rolling out channel subscriptions for exclusive content from preferred channels for a monthly fee. When asked, WhatsApp said channel admins can set this monthly fee within a range.

“It’s only going to be available to select channel partners at the beginning. We hope to broaden it and roll it out more widely. Initially, we will not take any of the fixed fee, so the same will be going directly to channel admins. The payments will happen through the app stores from the user side,” said Newton-Rex.

Further, WhatsApp will also introduce promoted channels, where users will discover new channels that might be interesting to them. This is the first time admins can boost their presence and grow their channel, said WhatsApp.

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Published on June 16, 2025