{"id":1220625,"date":"2022-10-10T16:58:28","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T16:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/10\/10\/in-india-businesses-are-increasingly-spamming-users-on-whatsapp\/"},"modified":"2022-10-10T16:58:28","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T16:58:28","slug":"in-india-businesses-are-increasingly-spamming-users-on-whatsapp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/10\/10\/in-india-businesses-are-increasingly-spamming-users-on-whatsapp\/","title":{"rendered":"In India, businesses are increasingly spamming users on WhatsApp \u2022"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\">As Meta makes deeper inroads with businesses on WhatsApp, its biggest bet to monetize the instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, we are getting an early glimpse at how user experience might change on the free app. It\u2019s not great.<\/p>\n<p>Scores of people in India, WhatsApp\u2019s largest market by users with over 500 million accounts, have complained about getting too many spam texts from businesses in recent months. WhatsApp, which quickly displaced the SMS app in the country by offering free texts, is increasingly looking like that SMS app, users say.<\/p>\n<p>Thousands of brands in India have signed up for WhatsApp, consistently succeeding in reaching eyeballs of more than 80% users, a person familiar with the matter said, a figure miles ahead of campaigns run on emails and traditional texts. What\u2019s more annoying is that even after users have blocked some businesses, many return to the inbox from different phone numbers, according to author\u2019s account.<\/p>\n<div class=\"embed breakout\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">WhatsApp for business is fast becoming WhatsApp for spam. \ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n<p>Blocking a couple of accounts every day, these days. PR agencies are also now spamming on WhatsApp. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/dvgbqx7cz8\">pic.twitter.com\/dvgbqx7cz8<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/nixxin\/status\/1570310985621315585?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 15, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"embed breakout\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">WhatsApp is the new spam machine, it has become what it intended to solve with SMS.<\/p>\n<p>Ola \/ Uber services are no where close to what they were to replace\u2026 taxi \/ cabs.<\/p>\n<p>Every domain, brings up an opportunity to innovate every few years.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 pj (@BeingPractical) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/BeingPractical\/status\/1541260469024960512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">June 27, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<p>In many ways, the issue doesn\u2019t come as a surprise.<\/p>\n<p>Google offered businesses in India the ability to use RCS to supercharge their communication with customers in the country, the company\u2019s biggest market by users. Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the collective effort of a number of industry players to supercharge the traditional SMS with modern features such as richer texts and end-to-end encryption.<\/p>\n<p>The company had to halt the service in the country after\u00a0some businesses started to abuse the company\u2019s anti-spam policies to send promotional messages to users in India.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Read more about WhatsApp\u2019s rampant spam issue on Rest of the World.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As Meta makes deeper inroads with businesses on WhatsApp, its biggest bet to monetize the instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, we are getting an early glimpse at how user experience might change on the free app. It\u2019s not great. Scores of people in India, WhatsApp\u2019s largest market by users with over 500 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1171189,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1220625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1220625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1220625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1220625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1220625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}