Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal had reported that Facebook was putting its WhatsApp advertising plans "on ice".
The development came as a major surprise, given how desperately Facebook had been trying to monetize the messaging service, and left questions over the possibility of ads appearing in WhatsApp in the future.
Now, thanks to a new report, we have some answers around that.
According to a report in The Information, Facebook still plans to show ads in WhatsApp but that will not happen any time soon.
Essentially, the company will move ahead with the project once it is done unifying the underlying infrastructure of the messaging service with Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs - another ambitious project the social network announced last year.
While Facebook had already announced that it would show ads in the Status section of WhatsApp, much like Instagram ads, there was little-to-no information around how it would determine what ads to show on the end-to-end encrypted service.
The Information report now sheds light on this, noting that the company would use phone numbers to match WhatsApp and Facebook accounts and target adverts accordingly.
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