Starting April 1, 2025, WhatsApp business messaging will pause all marketing use cases in North America. This temporary move aims to “enhance the consumer experience” and applies specifically to marketing, not conversational or informational messages, which will continue as usual.
WhatsApp has grown quickly in North America, particularly within the expanding Hispanic population. Even without SMS-level reach, it’s an important messaging medium. This pullback echoes the temporary RCS shutdown in India, where Google paused RCS to control spam and protect the channel. Google later partnered with Vodafone Idea and Dotgo to carefully reintroduce it to the market.
That’s what’s happening here: Marketing remains messaging’s dominant use case and always will be. But if the platform owner doesn’t actively protect channel quality, spam will inevitably destroy the medium.
It wasn’t Facebook that truly killed Friendster but fake adult accounts flooding the network. Even in payments, keeping fraud and chargebacks below 2% is critical for trust. Human tolerance for spam and negative experiences is extremely low—one bad review often carries more weight than a hundred five-star ones. There’s probably a behavioral reason I don’t fully understand; it just is this way.
The takeaway isn’t to gloat but to appreciate why RCS Business Messaging rollout has been cautious. Onboarding, vetting, and re-vetting agents take time precisely because they must be done right. Like Meta, the messaging industry is playing the long game.
Let’s not see this as a retreat but rather a thoughtful, strategic pause. After all, this is the same company that paid $1 billion for Instagram and $16 billion for WhatsApp—both deals considered outrageous at the time. Meta will be back, stronger and clearer about its intentions.
My only question for the Meta folks is this: Are abandoned-cart notifications considered marketing messages? Curious minds want to know.