For a pharaonic amount, Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014: $19 billion in cash and shares. It is the Zuckerberg company's largest acquisition ever made, but the operation has always had a big question: how to make the investment profitable? In fact, Facebook has been trying to identify a way to monetize the app since 2014, even though it has always ensured that it would remain completely user-free. In fact, we're just thinking about "serving" advertising for now.
While the services offered are completely free, Facebook is a profit-making business and the investments made always refer to the goal of earning money. It is clear that the arrival of any form of monetization would have appeared on the messaging customer and the company also planned the timing after the first assumptions and official confirmations: in fact, after confirming the plans to monetize the app, a date has also emerged. WhatsApp's advertising will be distributed in 2020.
The advertisements will appear for Android devices on the client as well as on the iPhone: as we already knew, they will be inserted in the states of the users, just like for example on Instagram. But the states are called "stories" there, but the concept is the same. The advertisements will occupy the entire screen, but the name of the company that disclosed the advertisement will be reproduced instead of showing the user's name regularly in the contact list. Obviously, the possibility of "swipe up" to allow the user to go to the site of the product or service promoted will accompany every advertisement.
Whether Facebook already has other projects with regard to advertising exposure on WhatsApp is currently unclear. For example, a solution might be to reproduce promotional messages in the client's main screen list between one conversation and another. We currently only have an unofficial confirmation of the date when we will see the first advertisements, and this will not happen before 2020.