Soon, users will see ads with contacts on the chat screen on instant messaging application WhatsApp, a report by The Financial Times stated.
The move is in line with its parent company – Meta – working to shore up its advertising revenue.
Deliberations are ongoing, but no final decision has been made. Moreover, the company is also exploring if it can charge a subscription fee to use the app ad-free, the report stated.
Report also highlighted the features saying users will see ads next to the chats with friends and other contacts, and these ads are unlikely to be shown inside the chat. The interface would look similar to how adverts are interspersed among chats in Facebook Messenger and emails in Gmail.
However, soon after the story was out, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart took to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and said that the company is not working on this.
“This @FT story is false. We aren’t doing this,” he wrote in a post.
The question of ads over WhatsApp has been there since 2014 when Meta acquired WhatsApp. Given how aggressive Facebook and Instagram were in monetising user data, there was a fear that soon ads would also come to WhatsApp.
Even after WhatsApp and Facebook concluded their deal, the management at the two companies categorically said that WhatsApp will never have ads and that chat data or users will not be used for tracking and monetisation.