Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Facebook is “backing away” from earlier plans to sell ads for placement inside its enormously popular WhatsApp messaging service. According to The Wall Street Journal, the team that had been working on building ads into WhatsApp was disbanded in recent months, with their work subsequently “deleted from WhatsApp’s code.”
The Journal notes that Facebook still ultimately aims to integrate ads into WhatsApp’s Status feature, but for now, the app will remain ad-free. The company’s desire to monetize WhatsApp, which it acquired for $22 billion in 2014, is part of what drove WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum out of Facebook in 2018. His fellow co-founder Brian Acton left months earlier (over similar clashes related to privacy and targeted…