Facebook’s messaging platform, Messenger, will now carry ads as part of a pilot program as the social media giant seeks out new avenues to drive growth.
The ads are similar to the ones that have already been there on the Facebook news feed and include an image together with a text and a link. Of course, businesses have the image along with the accompanying text as bait for users to click on them to know more about what is on offer. They can also get into a chat conversation right away if they’d like to take things further on.
The ads are being placed in between the ‘Favorites’ and the ‘Active Now’ section, which makes it a prominent place for you to hardly miss out on them. That also means you will have to scroll more to get to the other Messenger features that would naturally be pushed down south. That way, there would be five ads that the user can view when scrolled sideways.
That should still be acceptable as long as the ads don’t creep into the actual conversations. Also, fortunately, the same schematics that goes into selecting the ads in Facebook news feed also comes into play when displaying the ads in Messenger, explained Stan Chudnovsky, head of product for Messenger.
That way, the actual content of the conversations has no role in it. Or in other words, the conversations remain private as they are at the moment.
Currently, the ads will be visible to only a select group of Messenger app users in Thailand and Australia. Facebook would be watching how users react to such ads before deciding on the future course of action.
With over a billion monthly users of the Messenger app, Facebook sure has a solid reason to cash in on the app’s popularity by placing suitable ads. The social media company also justified their placement of the ads claiming the Messenger app is used to send more than a billion messages to companies every month.
