Facebook Desperate For More Ad Money, Invades Messenger

Despite its humongous size as a social media entity, Facebook is quickly running out of space for placing ads. This puts it at risk of losing momentum, halting its substantial growth progress as a result. In order to avoid this outcome, Facebook is now looking to Messenger for ad space, which will inevitably leave less room for everything else.

Facebook has done all it could to fit ads in its main platform without getting on the nerves of users via pop ups and those obnoxiously huge banners. Now, it’s thinking about implementing a News Feed carousel setup inside the Messenger app, Recode reports.

According Messenger’s head of product, Stan Chudnovsky, the new feature will be rolled out slowly. The first to try it out will be users in Thailand and Australia, and the ads will supposedly appear “below the fold.” This basically means that in order to find the ads, users will need to scroll down.

With regards to how the companies will know who to target, it will basically work the same way with the main Facebook platform. So users can rest easy in knowing that they won’t have to worry about what they say during chats since companies will not have access to such information.

This isn’t actually the first time that Facebook inserted ads into Messenger since it experimented with chat insertions in the past. Companies that the users have already interacted with can send them a prompt, which the users can choose to ignore.

The timing of the announcement with regards to the new ad format is interesting as well because Facebook’s earnings report will be released next week. Executives have already warned investors in advance that profits might not be stellar this time around due to the diminishing ad space, Mashable reports. This could be Facebook’s way of convincing the flock not to abandon ship.