Facebook advertising or user spamming?
I wasn’t surprised when I first read about Facebook trying to monetize its most successful and fast-growing product. Messenger, Facebook’s messaging app, became massively popular overtime “forcing” executives at Facebook to begin considering methods to create revenue from their famous app.
A document allegedly obtained by TechCrunch details that sometime in Q2 2016, Facebook Messenger will adopt ads. It’s not 100% clear how exactly those ads are going to be distributed to the users but we have some initial information of the concept that Facebook is working on.
Targeted advertising, not spamming.
Businesses will have the ability to message users and forward their ads to them. Although this sounds terrible it will be done with a sense of control. At least that’s what is being said. Companies that want to advertise will only be able to forward their ads to people that have already messaged those companies in the past. To put it more simply, businesses will not be able to send ads randomly to Facebook users.
The outcome
This is comforting and scary at the same time. What if I have to message a company at some time? Should I be afraid to do so? Does messaging a company mean that I have to expect a huge amount of spam in the future from them? Personally I’m completely opposite to the idea of creating revenue from Messenger using advertisement but “money thirsty” Facebook wouldn’t agree with me.
Advertising isn’t the only way
Advertising isn’t the only way to create revenue from your product. Take for example Snapchat and its new paid features. So why insist of demoting the experience that users have with your product? This is a question that Facebook will probably have to answer in a few months. Let’s hope they change their plans until then.