WhatsApp users will start seeing adverts on the app as early as next year

Mark Zuckerberg is at it again

WhatsApp users - roughly 1.5 billion of us chimplike creatures - will start seeing adverts on our favourite group chat, emoji firing, 'great banter' providing, phone messaging service from 2019. *clears throat* IS NOTHING SACRED MARK ZUCKERBERG? IS NOTHING. SACRED!? WhatsApp was great, originally, because it was free. Even now, with a 69p annual fee, it's still excellent value for money. Where else can you get roasted by your mates? Where else can you distribute memes and gifs to your bros/your galdem/your fellow content providers and absorbers as you ponder everything from the meaning of the universe to investigating whether someone in your midst had one too many last night, before then holding an impromptu WhatsApp court hearing to decide if they did indeed utterly embarrass themselves and their associates in the taxi home? Nowhere else. Facebook messenger is useless. iMessage excludes all the Android users out there. WhatsApp is the only place. Give your group a funny name - usually an in-joke only its members will understand - and fire away, endlessly, back and forth and back and forth until eventually your phone is crippled by the 20,000 images you have of... of... well, nothing. Of your mate's mildly bruised foot he hurt playing football. Of a family member in a Christmas jumper. A blurry selfie you took outside a chicken shop. These sorts of images. These sorts of portraits of nothingness. And yet, they are precious, in their own way. Just to ruin it, Mark Zuckerberg is planning on adding adverts to the app four years on from his purchase of the company for $22 billion in 2014. Founder of WhatsApp, Brian Acton, who has since left the company revealed the news in an interview with Forbes. He said: "Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy. You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country. You don’t need a sophisticated sales force. It’s a very simple business. [Facebook] represent a set of business practices, principles and ethics, and policies that I don’t necessarily agree with." Users will see the targeted ads pop up on the status screen from 2019. Meanwhile, the gang over in 'The Fellowship' group are debating whether or not the pyramids were built by aliens.