- The founders of WhatsApp resisted ads in The application for years, including after the company was obtained by META for $ 22 billion in 2014. BRAN ACTON and Jan Koum left the company in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and on Monday Meta submitted ads in the “Status” feature in addition to the channels you sponsor in the “update” tab in WhatsApp.
Jan Koum and Brian Acton in WhatsApp did not want to include ads on their correspondence platform, but the new owner Meta moved forward on Monday with a plan to do so.
Facebook and Instagram Mother, which bought WhatsApp in 2014, He said On Monday, ads will provide the “update” tab for the application, which the company said is considered on 1.5 billion users per day. The “Status” feature, which shows images or videos now hidden, will include ads such as “stories” on Instagram, and advertisers can now pay to increase their WhatsApp channels. The company said in a blog publication that people and companies that run their own channels will be able to sell subscriptions to their content.
The new advertising features to see the WhatsApp viewing. When Koum and Acton first launched the app in 2009 after leaving their jobs in Yahoo! The husband actively resisted the addition of ads after the previous bad experiments. Instead, they used users users one dollar annually to use the service after a free year.
According to what was reported, former CEO Kom retained a memo of Acton to his office to remind him of the company’s mission, according to the partner of Sequoia Capital Jim Getz.
Jean keeps a memo of Brian registered at his office, which reads, “No ads! No games! No tricks! “It is a daily reminder of their commitment to continue to focus on building a pure messenger experience.” Blog post.
When Koum and Acton sold the company to Meta (then Facebook) 22 billion dollars in 2014, Meta assured them that it will keep whatsApp free of advertising and the couple will not have to settle their principles, as Goetz wrote in the blog post. In their blog post, the founders also promised “There are absolutely no ads intersection Washington Post I mentioned In 2018.
However, the founders of WhatsApp were said to have later clashed with the leadership of the WhatsApp. Acton and Koum WhatsApp, in 2017 and 2018, left, respectively, after a long battle about pressing WhatsApp to share more data with Facebook as well as pay by Meta to include ads in WhatsApp.
In 2019, Acton said in an interview with Forbes Meta plans to include ads in the WhatsApp case have broken social compassion with application users. “The targeted advertisement is what makes me unhappy,” he said.
Acton said that when Acton suggested an alternative to advertising WhatsApp, which included charging users to the messages sent after cutting free messages, Sherlyl Sandberg, then the most prominent operating officials of the company, dropped it because it will not expand.
“I called her once,” Acton told Forbes. “I was like, no, you do not mean that it will not expand. You mean that he will not earn a lot of money …, “It is a kind of steady and joyful.
A Meta spokesman said in a statement to luck The company is talking about the integration of ads into WhatsApp for years, and added that the new ads features will not interrupt user conversations.
“We think this reflects how people want to use WhatsApp and means if you are just WhatsApp to send personal messages to friends and family, nothing changes,” said a spokesman.
This story was originally shown on Fortune.com
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