Later, it turns out that Messenger plans to make money the same way Facebook and Instagram do: With advertising.
“We’re not going to take cuts of payments,” Marcus said in a recent interview with Recode. “The one thing we traditionally do, and is a decent business for us, is advertising. So we’ll continue focusing on that.”
Messenger’s advertising efforts are relatively new; it offers just two types of ads. Last fall, Messenger launched News Feed ads that direct people back to the messaging app; then in January it started putting ads inside the Messenger inbox. That, for now, is the way the company plans to make money off its billion-plus monthly users.