Over the past few years, Facebook has made efforts to try and get its users to migrate to its Messenger chat app, where instead of being able to chat within Facebook’s app, you’ll have to download a separate app. Even on the web version of Facebook, the company has also adopted a new Messenger UI as if to drive home the point.That being said it seems that the reason why Facebook has done this has been revealed. In a post on the Messenger Blog, Facebook has announced that they are now testing out a way to serve ads in the Messenger app. We reckon this might not have been possible had Facebook stuck to the old Messenger system of chatting within the Facebook app itself.
According to Facebook’s announcement, “This week we are launching a very small test in Australia and Thailand that gives businesses the opportunity to place ads on the Messenger home screen. This means that a business is able to place an ad in an area of Messenger below your recent conversations, similar to how we surface birthday notifications or where we let you know if a friend is currently active on Messenger.”
These ads cannot be turned off, but instead users will have the option of hiding them or reporting ads that they don’t think are relevant. Will such ads ultimately get in the way of the user experience? We guess that remains to be seen, so maybe you should probably just start getting used to them.