Facebook Messenger: Advertising can wait
Facebook wants to take its time in making money with the short message service Messenger. "We don't want to plaster the app with advertising," and convenience has priority, said Facebook manager David Marcus on the sidelines of the DLD Internet conference in Munich.
Facebook is in no rush to generate revenue from the platform, he said. One consideration for the future is to give companies a channel to communicate with customers via Messenger and let them pay for it, Marcus said. On the other hand, Marcus dampened speculation about integrating payment features into Messenger: "We're not interested in building a payment business right now."
The 41-year-old ran the Paypal payment service in the Ebay Group until switching to Facebook last year. Marcus reiterated that the short message service Whatsapp, which also belongs to Facebook, operates largely independently. WhatsApp kept the company headquarters outside of the Facebook premises, there would be as announced no data merger, they only exchanged regularly about the strategy. "Besides, it is agreed that some new features we are testing could be integrated into Whatsapp over time," Marcus said. That will also be the case with money-making ideas, he added. "We have no plans to merge the two services."
The takeover of Whatsapp by Facebook for just under $23 billion had triggered concerns among many users that their data would be linked to the online network's holdings. Facebook and Whatsapp assured that this was not planned. "Right now, it's not about data," Marcus said. Currently, he said, both services have a goal of cracking the one billion user mark. (SDA)
