Facebook-owned WhatsApp has announced the appointment of a new Chief Operations Officer (COO) as the social media firm looks set to start making money from the instant messaging app it acquired in 2014.
WhatsApp has been providing its service free to all its users worldwide ever since launch. The instant messaging app does not make money through ads like Instagram and Facebook.
With the view to seek alternate and innovative ways to monetize the app soon, Facebook’s executive, Matt Idema has been appointed as the new COO for WhatsApp.
According to a Recode report, Idema was announced as the newly appointed COO on Tuesday, and “monetization will be his key focus”. However, his full role is reportedly still being ironed out.
Idema was Vice President of Product Marketing at Facebook, his LinkedIn profile still notes, responsible for “product strategy and global go-to-market for all of Facebook’s Advertising and Business Products”.
The report adds that Idema will begin his new role at WhatsApp in the coming weeks and will report directly to WhatsApp Chief Executive Officer, Jan Koum.
WhatsApp waived off its nominal annual subscription fee last January, and wrote on its blog that it will look at alternate methods to monetize.
“Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from.
“That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight.
“We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam,” Koum wrote in the blog post.
Inside WhatsApp’s code, many references to structured messages for business and ‘enterprise’ have also been found, the most notable one being the translation of these messages to the user’s local language. What this means is that WhatsApp Enterprise could launch soon, which means businesses could use this feature to send messages to their targeted audiences directly through WhatsApp. These messages could arrive via push notifications, and presumably, could be disabled if the user so prefers. Of course in the absence of any official announcement, this is all speculation at this point.
However, Idema’s appointment could mean that he would oversee the development of the rumoured WhatsApp Enterprise, and scale up the team if the need be.
Currently, WhatsApp has around 200 employees, and caters to over 1 billion users globally. With these monetization measures, WhatsApp looks to finally become a revenue-making vertical, as it hasn’t been making any money.
However, the biggest unique selling proposition (USP) of the app is its ad-free and spam-free nature, and WhatsApp will have to really be innovative to not break that USP and still figure out ways to make money.
There will be more clarity on how WhatsApp plans to monetize once it starts testing tools in beta.