Leaked documents suggest Facebook is bringing ads to Messenger, with a caveat

Early this year, Facebook announced that it had reached over 800 million active users for its Facebook Messenger platform.

Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has previously made public comments indicating that the company was testing ads on the Messenger platform. Facebook is now distributing a document to business partners indicating that they will be able to send ad messages to customers directly starting this year though businesses will only be able to message customers that have started a conversation.

Facebook, thankfully for its users, will not let companies send their advertising messages to anyone or even those people who liked their FIB pages. Seemed like there were only a few pristine, ad-free places on the Internet, Facebook Messenger being one of them. PayPal President, David Marcus, was hired by Facebook in 2014 to run Facebook Messenger. The level of execution will largely depend on advertisers’ ability to be creative with the medium, but if they are, Messenger ads “just may become the app’s main money maker”, she says. In his January 7 blog post about recent and coming developments with Messenger, Marcus did not specifically refer to the addition of ads, but did indicate more changes were coming. Businesses will also encourage users to send messages, so that they can send ads to users once the feature goes live. It has reportedly also been quietly experimenting with a bot chat feature – which enables developers to build personal assistants for ecommerce experiences within Messenger. Before now, users had to keep logging in and out of Messenger to access the messages from various accounts.

The buildup to ads on Messenger has fit Facebook’s pattern of being cautious and selective with how it introduces ads within its products. When Facebeook acquired WhatsApp, Mr. Zuckerberg confirmed that the messaging platform won’t be monetized through ads.

A formal announcement of ads into Messenger may boost the company’s share price, as analysts begin to assess the potential for added revenue from ads, with Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter saying it was not built into his revenue and earnings model.