If you have seen the business world closely, you will see patterns and trends emerge inside this industry when it comes to how it operates. Now, this is the same for online businesses as well which are also corporate houses at the end of the day.
As we have seen with Google, the company’s main way of earning money is with the help of free services that serve ads for its users. Now, Google’s users have acknowledged the fact that they will have to see ads if they want to use the platform for free or they can pay for ad-free usage of services such as YouTube and others.
According to a recent report, Facebook was also going to follow Google’s route by bringing ads to WhatsApp which is a social messaging app brought by the company for a few years. As we all know, WhatsApp is quite popular and is used by billions in India and worldwide.
Therefore, the reports of ads being brought to Facebook were met with controversy and it looks like Facebook has also felt the pinch of it. Because the company has reportedly backed off on its plans to integrate ads inside WhatsApp.
Wall Street Journal reports that “WhatsApp in recent months disbanded a team that had been established to find the best ways to integrate ads into the service, according to people familiar with the matter. The team’s work was then deleted from WhatsApp’s code, the people said.”
A previous report mentioned that ads inside WhatsApp could first come to the WhatsApp Stories feature and make its way to other sections eventually. But it looks like Facebook will now try to find different monetization methods for WhatsApp instead of ads.
While it is obvious that Facebook would like to take advantage of revenue from WhatsApp’s 1.5 Billion users, bringing ads could also mean that the user base could reduce drastically which is also not what Facebook wants. So this is a thin rope where Facebook has to walk on and somehow balance itself as well.
