It is all coming down. Fast.
Less than 24 hours after Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp, left Facebook, David Marcus, the company’s vice-president of messaging products, announced the inevitable at Facebook’s annual F8 Developers conference. “As far as advertising is concerned, we’re definitely getting WhatsApp more open,” Marcus told CNBC. He added, “We’re now going to have the ability to enable larger companies, not only small businesses, to integrate a new API to send and receive messages with people on the WhatsApp platform.” This was echoed by a Tuesday note by Barclays analysts, who wrote, “We have been told by many of our checks over the last few years that ‘once Jan leaves, that’s when the ads show up.”
That would be: now.