Users of WhatsApp will soon encounter advertisements within certain sections of the app. This move comes as Meta Platforms, the company that owns WhatsApp, seeks to establish a new revenue avenue by engaging the billions who utilize this messaging service.

The ads will exclusively appear in the app’s Updates tab, which is accessed by around 1.5 billion individuals daily. Crucially, these ads will not be featured in locations where personal chats occur, as confirmed by WhatsApp’s developers.

According to a blog post from WhatsApp, “The personal messaging experience on WhatsApp remains unchanged, ensuring that personal messages, calls, and statuses remain end-to-end encrypted and will not serve as a basis for ads.”

It’s a big change for the company, whose founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton vowed to keep the platform free of ads when they created it in 2009.

Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014 and the pair left a few years later.

Parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has long been trying to generate revenue from WhatsApp.

WhatsApp said ads will be targeted to users based on information like their age, the country or city where they’re located, the language they’re using, the channels they’re following in the app, and how they’re interacting with the ads they see.

WhatsApp said it won’t use personal messages, calls and groups that a user is a member of to target ads to the user.

It’s one of three advertising features that WhatsApp unveiled on Monday as it tries to monetise the app’s user base.

Channels will also be able to charge users a monthly fee for subscriptions so they can get exclusive updates. And business owners will be able to pay to promote their channel’s visibility to new users.

Most of Meta’s revenue comes from ads. In 2025, the Menlo Park, California-based company’s revenue totalled US$164.5 billion ($AUD 252.3 billion) and US$160.6 billion ($AUD 246.3 billion) of it came from advertising.