Facebook has put to hold earlier plans to show advertisements on the status feature of its instant messaging app, WhatsApp.
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.”
Reports say Facebook still aims to integrate ads into WhatsApp’s Status feature, but for now, the app will remain ad-free.
The desire to monetize WhatsApp, since it was acquired for $22 billion in 2014 by Facebook, had led the WhatsApp co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton to resign from Facebook about 2 years ago.
Facebook spokesperson also confirmed that WhatsApp now will focus on building features that let businesses communicate with customers in the app, as well as providing payments services to other countries.
Koum and Acton were reportedly concerned that a commercial messaging feature would force WhatsApp to weaken its end-to-end encryption.
The two co-founders had in 2012 blog post referred to ads as “the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought.”
