How will Facebook monetize Messenger? Why, ads, of course

Facebook is gearing up to send you unsolicited vendor messages through its standalone messaging app, leaked documents show, provided you have voluntarily chatted up the seller in question for something. Say, you wanted to buy a gizmo, found the shop on Facebook, and shot a question via Messenger on your phone.

Facebook introduced this service for vendors, naming it Business for Messenger, and on the surface it is a pretty good experience - you can speak directly to someone and get real-time info about your order or inquiry in an informal chat session. The businesses, however, will be able to ping you back, the inside document shows, once you have initiated a chat session with them, and serve you messages that can quickly turn to spam or advertising, if Facebook is not careful to reign in the content.

The social network is currently trying to entice users to message businesses directly by slipping the URL "fb.com/msg/" on the hush-hush, offering vendors an easy way to get you to message them personally, instead of going to their Facebook page, and write on the wall, for instance. The leaked document mentions that if a vendor can get to a 90% response rate to its messages to customers in a 24-hour span over a week timeframe, the Messenger handle of said business will start popping up in Facebook's search results.

We all know that it takes only one unbeatable promotion to get people to reply in the vast majority of the cases, though. We'll see how this attempt to monetize the Messenger's 800 million users pans out, but for now it seems that Facebook's ad-targeting approach is pretty subtle, so there's hope it won't turn into an endless spam feed.

source: TechCrunch

5 Comments

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posted on 19 Feb 2016, 04:47 3

1. Zylam (Posts: 1083; Member since: 20 Oct 2010)

Good, I hope it turns into a spam bot engine and destory's itself.

posted on 19 Feb 2016, 04:55 2

2. BobLawblaw (unregistered)

Already disabled it on my Note 5 along with the Facebook app. Battery and space hogging rubbish..

posted on 19 Feb 2016, 08:32

3. joevsyou (Posts: 1030; Member since: 28 Feb 2015)

i think it's a cool idea, however if i get random message notification and crap or random companies just messaging me, i will delete this asap,

posted on 19 Feb 2016, 09:00

4. Coconut00 (Posts: 485; Member since: 13 Jan 2015)

Hopefully they don't do this to whatsapp.

posted on 19 Feb 2016, 09:03

5. Leo_MC (Posts: 2529; Member since: 02 Dec 2011)

Well, it's not the only app for IM that's why at the first sign of ad I will have no problem switching from it.