It feels like WhatsApp is everywhere. Who isn’t familiar with the gentle ding as a message arrives – the relentless group chats, or the customer service bots? According to recent statistics, the service is used regularly by nearly 3 billion people around the world. Its core service – end-to-end encrypted messaging – is essential in today’s society.
But private messaging services like WhatsApp are costly to run, and not something people are accustomed to paying for. Securing an income stream for them isn’t obvious. So it made the news recently that WhatsApp is going to start showing ads – in a relatively limited way – as part of a wider push to generate revenue.