In March, Facebook announced yet another big change to Messenger: the introduction of a new feature allowing users to communicate with businesses. Now, it seems that the world's most popular social networking site is looking at the consumer-to-business messaging capability as a big monetization opportunity.
Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's vice president of advertising, revealed the company's plan to make money from Messenger Tuesday, Sept. 22, during an onstage interview at TechCrunch's Disrupt SF.
"We're at the very early stages of businesses having direct relationships with customers through messaging," said Bosworth. "We start with the consumer behaviors. If you think about consumers communicating to businesses through messaging, it's not a big leap to go from that to a monetization strategy."
Bosworth believes there is a "tremendous opportunity in the messaging space" since consumers want to transact with businesses using their favorite messaging service.
While Facebook has yet to go into detail how exactly the app will make money, it has, however, already disclosed some ideas it is currently working on.
In August, we reported that the company launched M, its digital personal assistant integrated into Messenger. This was developed in the hopes of competing with the likes of Siri, Cortana and Google Now.
What's interesting with M is it can complete certain tasks for the user, such as making reservations as well as ordering items.
"M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It's powered by artificial intelligence that's trained and supervised by people," said David Marcus, Facebook's head of messaging, in a statement.
Facebook said this artificial intelligence is still in its infancy.
Recently, we also reported about Facebook pushing out a new communication feature for Pages, allowing business owners to send private messages to customers and, also, letting users start a conversation with business pages via the "Send Message" button.
To date, Messenger has already reached 700 million active users every month. The app is only one of the applications that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, has targeted to grow to one billion users.
The app is now deemed as the second most popular application in the United States, beating Google's YouTube.
