Facebook is reportedly dropping its plans to roll out ads in WhatsApp, but not entirely.
This has been revealed in a report by The Wall Street Journal, which also says that Facebook has 'disbanded' the team that was leading efforts to integrates ads into the service.
In addition to dismantling the team working on this project, Facebook has also completely removed codes that it had worked on for supporting ads on the platform.
Having said that, the report says that Facebook hasn't, however, dropped its plan to integrate ads into the Status feature and will be rolling that out at some point in time. “Those efforts are now on ice. The company plans at some point to introduce ads to Status,” the report states.
This move marks a major shift in Facebook’s strategy for monetising WhatsApp.
Another recent report said that WhatsApp will start rolling out ads in the Status feature starting this year.
Implementation of ads questions privacy. WhatsApp says it cannot access your data because of a promised end-to-end encryption for all users. However, by simple logic, playing ads will require WhatsApp to access that data so that ads can be targeted. Ads cannot be practically relevant without any consumer data.
The plans to monetise the messaging platform attracted many controversies. It's speculated that WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton quit Facebook because of this pressure to monetise Facebook.