South Africa, June 25 -- Back when Meta (then known simply as Facebook) bought it in 2014 for $19bn, WhatsApp had an unusual and simple business model. Users were required to pay a very small annual fee $1 in return for a minimalist, ad-free experience.

That fee was scrapped in 2016, and WhatsApp became fully free. But it always had the potential to eventually align with Meta's wider operation of offering free services for users to connect to others - while making money from targeted advertising.Since then, WhatsApp has taken slow, deliberate steps toward making money.

These strategies relied on income from businesses, which paid to use WhatsApp as a way of communicating with their customers. By 2024, over 700 million businesses were us...