“Jan was showing me his address book,” Koum’s friend and entrepreneur Alex Fishman told me for a profile on Koum in 2014. In 2009, when Jan Koum started building what would become the most popular messaging app in the wold, he started off by building a status app. The original status-update page on the first version of WhatsApp (Image via WhatsApp)Īlthough Status is for all intents and purposes a copy of Snapchat’s Stories, the feature actually goes back to the roots of why WhatsApp was built in the first place. We wanted to offer an simple, secure, and reliable way for people to share this type of content with all their contacts at once.”

“Over time, we’ve seen a big uptick in users sharing rich content, such as photos, videos and GIFs on WhatsApp. “As a utility, we’re focused on building features that will be used around the world by our 1.2 billion users,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told FORBES. WhatsApp may have experimented with bots in the hope that it didn’t have to go down the tried-and-tested route of displaying content Koum and his co-founder Brian Acton have been vehemently against advertising on their app since their early days, but monetizing their app in any other way does sound almost impossible. So far, attempts on Facebook messenger and elsewhere to invite “bots” from advertisers to chat to people has fallen flat - any success there needs smarter artificial intelligence behind it and so is probably some ways off. That has always sounded like a tall order - businesses ultimately want to persuade people, not just inform them - and particularly difficult given the chatting system that’s at the centre of WhatApp itself.įacebook has been able to rake billions in revenue each quarter from advertisers precisely because it can insert their videos and photos into its content-heavy Newsfeed.

WhatsApp said more than a year ago that it was looking at ways that businesses could send messages to its users in an unobtrusive and useful way. It also potentially opens the door to messages from businesses, or rather, advertisers.

Status will change that use case for the first time.

New whatsapp status