Most social networks are free, but in order for them to work, they need money to pay staff and maintain the servers. One way social networks can maintain their “free” model while still paying the bills is by serving ads to their users and now we might see them on Messenger.
Facebook is testing a way to display ads between your chat threads. Apparently there were “promising results from Australia and Thailand” and thanks to that, Facebook is now expanding this display ads beta test to businesses. There are 1.2 billion users in Messenger and Facebook wants the social networking app to start generating money, like its sibling Instagram.
These ads that will be shown on Messenger will be found on the home tab while you scroll through your message threads. When users tap on the ad, they will be sent to the destination page that was chosen by the advertiser, which could be a Messenger conversation or a website.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook says that these ads that will appear in your messages will depend on “how many threads a user has, the size of their phone’s physical screen and the pixel density of the display.”
The new ad format will join the other ad products Facebook has for Messenger which include Click to Messenger ads and Sponsored messages. You bet such a move will make people say that they are intrusive and it will definitely change the user experience on Messenger.
Facebook says that a small percentage of people will begin to see these ads on their Home tab towards the end of this moth and then learn from this beta test. They promise to extend this to more people in the coming months.
