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Facebook Messenger To Get Payments Feature Eventually

Facebook released its Q2 earnings report on Wednesday. It was an impressive quarter, which led to the company’s stock opening at an all-time high. As usual, the company dropped the obligatory st...
Facebook Messenger To Get Payments Feature Eventually
Written by Chris Crum
  • Facebook released its Q2 earnings report on Wednesday. It was an impressive quarter, which led to the company’s stock opening at an all-time high.

    As usual, the company dropped the obligatory stats, and COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the company has 1.5 million active advertisers.

    The item from the earnings call that’s generating the most discussion on Thursday is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to say about payments and its Messenger service – basically that you will be able to make payments with Messenger eventually.

    Here’s what he said during the Q&A portion of the call (via Business Insider)

    Messenger will have — over time there will be some overlap between that and payments. But I guess what I’m just trying to say is two things. One is, the payments piece will be a part of what will help drive the overall success and help people share with each other and interact with businesses. But we’re really focused on the interactions overall, rather than the mechanism and David shares that view.

    And the second thing is just that there’s so much ground work that we need to do in order to make it so that people are communicating with businesses and public figures and entities in these other apps that we’re building, which is part of the business ecosystem. And I really can’t underscore that enough that we have a lot of work to do and we could take the cheap and easy approach and just try to put ads in or do payments and make some money in the short term. But we’re not going to do that. So to the extent that any of your models or anything reflects that we might be doing that, I would strongly encourage you here to adjust that, because we’re not going to and we’re going to take time to do this in the way that we think that’s going to be right over multiple years.

    Facebook has been doing a lot in the messaging realm lately from the pending WhatsApp acquisition to that strange Slingshot app to new a potential new “Instagram Bolt” app. The company has been tinkering with Payments offerings for years, so it’s hardly a shock that Facebook would consider putting both concepts together (really, it makes a lot more sense than Slingshot). They did, after all, hire PayPal’s David Marcus to run the messaging unit.

    On the earnings call, Zuckerberg said 12 billion messages are sent per day on Facebook.

    Image via Facebook

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