Facebook Plans To Earn Money From Messenger With ‘Click To Message’ Ads

In March of this year, Facebook made it possible for the first time for its 1.5 billion users to communicate with select businesses through its messaging service, Messenger. Now, the social media giant is investigating new ways to generate revenue from this growing trend.

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2015 this week, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, Andrew Bosworth, discussed the overall state of advertising on the social network. Although consumer-to-business messaging is still in its infancy on Facebook, Bosworth explained that he sees the feature as an incredibly important monetization opportunity.

“We’re at the very early stages of businesses having direct relationships with customers through messaging,” Bosworth said. “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.”

Currently, Messenger has approximately 700 million monthly active users, and it is not the only Facebook tool that allows people to talk directly to businesses. For example, Bosworth explained that in some countries, such as Spain, many people prefer to make reservations through Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp as opposed to contacting the business by phone.

“[Consumers] want to do it on their favorite messaging service,” explained Bosworth. “There’s tremendous opportunity in the messaging space to invest a lot more in that experience.”

Another method that exists for users to directly message businesses on Facebook is Pages for businesses. Users can send messages to businesses through their Pages, and Bosworth said that unique visits to Pages have grown 40 percent year-over-year.

Now, the social media giant has revealed its plans for a new ad-type called “Click to message” ads, which illustrates the company’s plans to make money from the growing interest in direct communication between users and businesses on its platform. The concept is that businesses would design ads about their company or product, and then Facebook would place a small “Message” button at the bottom. If a user saw the ad and felt compelled to click the button to send the business a question or comment, the business would pay for that ad click. And, of course, Facebook would be using these ads to generate revenue from the usage of Messenger.

“It’s a huge part of our larger strategy around Pages and call to actions,” said Bosworth. “If Pages can trigger real business outcomes for people, that’s a huge opportunity.”

Certainly, “Click to message” ads could help to make that happen. Bosworth explained that people use messaging with businesses largely to ask questions about products or to make reservations. He said that Facebook has noticed more phone call fatigue now than ever before, with an increasingly large percentage of people preferring to get their questions answered via a quick text exchange than through a phone call.

Even though the “click to message” ad format is very new, Bosworth is optimistic, saying that, “We think they could be really popular.”