Facebook’s Playbook for Monetizing WhatsApp and Messenger

Investors see Facebook as a platform of earning money as it has 700 million Messenger users, but Zuckerberg has put up an end on such expectations yesterday during the Q2 earnings call. He revealed that both Messenger and WhatsApp will run the same monetization playbook as Facebook and News Feed, get people interacting with business before you let organizations pay to reach customers.

Zuckerberg said, “If you go back to 2006 and 2007, there were a lot of people that were encouraging us to put the banner ads and inorganic content into the experience.” He also proclaimed “What we decided was that over the long term the ads and monetizing would perform better if there was an organic interaction between people using the product and business.”

Following that up, Facebook released pages that would give business a chance to set up a free presence on the website. The users are asked to subscribe to News Feed posts regarding the business they like to know about and provide insights with respect to it so that companies get to know about the impact of their Pages.

If it had jumped to paid commercials or flashy banners, users would have quickly ditched the News Feed and Facebook. And this obviously could have ruined its future revenue engine. Rather a usage hiked and dollars came with time. Zuckerberg wants to do the same thing with WhatsApp and Facebook