Facebook has picked Australia and Thailand to be the first two countries for testing ads on Facebook Messenger app.
The latest move from the social giant confirms that Australia is preferred choice as a testbed for new tech ventures.
Users participating in the trials will find ads appearing below the “recent conversations” section.
According to product manager Eddie Zhand, ads will not appear in conversation until users click on the advert or commence a conversation with it. These users, during trials, will be able to control their Messenger usage and hide/report specific ads.
“No one will see an ad in a conversation without clicking on an ad experience on the Messenger home screen or starting a conversation with a brand — these test ads won’t originate in your conversations,” he says.
According to Mr Zhang, Facebook found that users interact with brands through sponsored messages and ads on the app’s News Feed, and about one billion messages are sent Facebook users and businesses on Facebook Messenger each month. Mr Zhang said that after the new feature would open doors for brands to show off their products.
“The test group of people in Thailand and Australia will start to see these ads in the coming weeks,” he says.
“Businesses have long been telling us that they are very excited about the potential of the Messenger platform to reach their customers and help them to drive sales, build brand awareness and increase customer satisfaction,” Mr Zhang says.
“Our current offerings like ads that take people to Messenger conversations from their Facebook News Feed and sponsored messages have demonstrated that people are interested in hearing from and interacting with business and brands on Messenger.”
“In fact, people are already regularly messaging businesses with over 1 billion messages sent between people and businesses on Messenger each month.”
Earlier this month, reports had surfaced that Facebook is testing mid-roll video ads to boost its revenues. These reports said that these mid-roll ads for videos will be viewed for at least 20 seconds.
Every day, Facebook users view billions of clips on the platform, which means there are tremendous prospects for revenue generation for the social network.
Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, U.S., is the largest social networking website in the world. The Facebook website was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students Andrew McCollum, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz. Initially, the websites membership was limited to Harvard students, but it was later expanded to include higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford University. Since 2006, anyone aged 13 or above can register on the website.
By late 2007, there were 100,000 business pages on Facebook. These pages were created by companies to promote themselves and attract customers. On October 24, 2007, Microsoft revealed to have purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million. Once year later, Facebook announced its plan to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
In July 2010, the company announced to have touched the milestone of 500 million users, making it the world’s largest online social network at the time. At that time, almost half of the Facebook users were using the site daily, for an average of 34 minutes (according to the company’s data).
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