Facebook is the largest social network these days and with such scope, they’ve been expanding their offerings into other areas. From messaging to a marketplace and even its own video platform, Facebook is trying to offer as many services as it can to its 2 billion monthly active users. This type of work doesn’t come cheap and even though they make money from their own ad network, Facebook has been wanting to tap into their messaging platform as a revenue source for a while now.
Of those 2+ billion Facebook users, over 1 billion currently use Facebook Messenger to chat with people they know. It was just last year when Facebook’s VP of messaging products David Marcus spoke at Tech Crunch: Disrupt in San Francisco to confirm their plans to make money from the platform. At the time, the only details they announced were to allow bots that could accept payments without sending their user base to an external website to complete the transaction.
We’ve seen a big push of automated bots of all kinds in Facebook Messenger as of late, but now it looks like they’re working on tapping into another revenue stream for the platform. This week Facebook announced they would be testing ads within Facebook Messenger and its 1.2 billion monthly active users. These ads will be displayed on the home tab (as you can see from the featured image), and will be designated with a clear Sponsored market right above it.
Tapping on said ad will either send the user to the advertiser’s website, or simply open up a chat window so they can interact with the brand. Facebook has already completed its initial pilot program which happened in Australia and Thailand back in January of this year. It seems they were happy with the result as they’re now prepared to test this system globally.
Source: The Guardian
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