WhatsApp Adds Commercial Services as Meta Seeks More Revenue

By 2018, WhatsApp founders were headed out the door. Mr. Zuckerberg announced a plan to stitch together all the messaging services on the apps he owns — WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. The company made changes that allowed Facebook to glean more insights about how people use WhatsApp. WhatsApp maintains none of those changes were used for ad-tracking purposes.

Simultaneously, WhatsApp’s reach continued to spread globally, embraced by millions of users in Brazil and South America, as well as across the Middle East and much of the European Union.

Many of them included small and medium-size businesses that used WhatsApp for free to speak with customers. But the experience, WhatsApp has said, was clunky and sometimes difficult to navigate, and wasn’t designed with business services in mind.

WhatsApp’s new product is supposed to answer to such issues, and can let those businesses more easily communicate with their customers using the app. Cloud hosting services will be provided for free to businesses that use the Cloud API.

Mr. Zuckerberg said that more than one billion users connect with businesses across Meta’s messaging services every week, and that the new product would make things easier for businesses and customers.

“Today, most of us use our feeds to discover interesting content and stay up to date,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at the event. “But for deeper levels of interaction, messaging has become the center of our digital lives.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/technology/whatsapp-meta-commercial-services.html