WhatsApp Won’t Start Showing Ads to EU Users Until 2026

WhatsApp announced on Monday that it plans to introduce ads in the app’s “Updates” tab in the coming months, but EU users won’t see any ads this year. According to a report from Politico, the WhatsApp team informed the Irish Data Protection Commission that WhatsApp’s new advertising model, which also includes recommended Channels, won’t be coming to the EU until 2026.

“That new product won’t be launching [in] the EU market until 2026. We have been informed by WhatsApp and we will be meeting with them to discuss any issues further,” said Des Hogan, Commissioner for Data Protection and Chairperson of the Irish Data Protection Commission. Hogan added that there will be conversations with other data protection authorities about WhatsApp’s new advertising model “so that we can reflect back any concerns which we have as European regulators.”

WhatsApp now has more than 3 billion monthly active users, and to monetize this massive audience, the company will roll out ads in Status updates, promoted Channels, and paid Channel subscriptions. The company said that ads in Status or Channels will be personalized using location and language information, the Channels users follow, as well as ad preferences and information from Facebook and Instagram accounts connected to Meta’s Account Center.

The last point is probably what’s raising concerns among the Irish Data Protection Commission and other privacy organizations. “We’re still early days, we’ll engage as we do with every other new feature, new issue that they bring to us … and at this stage, it’s too early to say what, if any, will be any red line issues,” he said. Dale Sunderland, another Commissioner at the Irish Data Protection Commission.

Before WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook back in 2024, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum penned a blog post to explain his general disdain for ads. It’s still available on the company’s blog, and it’s interesting to look at it now as WhatsApp is about to introduce ads.

“Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen. Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product,” Koum wrote.

Koum left WhatsApp in 2018 and stepped down from Facebook’s board of directors along the way. Seven years later, ads are about to come to WhatsApp, and even though they will only be shown in the app’s Updates tab at launch, it remains to be seen if that will always be the case.