Facebook has made a decision to focus on advertising as the monetization model for Messenger, not payments, says the company’s VP of messaging products, David Marcus.
At least, for now.
“We’re not going to take cuts of payments,” Marcus said recently. “The one thing we traditionally do, and is a decent business for us, is advertising. So we’ll continue focusing on that.”
Inserting advertising into people’s messages could be a significant mistake, and one that I would not be shocked to see Facebook walk back after initial testing. Few people want to see ads mixed in with their most personal messages. And we’ve seen that messaging apps that incorporate payment options — both micropayments and not-so-micro — have been very successful, globally. LINE in Japan and WeChat in China are two common examples.