When Facebook hired David Marcus, the earlier president of PayPal, to run Facebook Messenger back in 2014, some understood the company would begin to build Messenger’s business model around payments and commerce.Other messaging apps like Line and WeChat were by now building fast-growing businesses just about commerce and payments, and the idea was that payments would offer a second revenue stream alongside Facebook’s advertising business. Plus, Facebook had Marcus — a payments guy — running the show. Earlier to running PayPal, Marcus had founded Zong, which processed payments for social games and apps on platforms like Facebook’s.
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.
