Facebook is reaping the rewards as its ad creep strategy pays off
NEW YORK — Scrolling through an ad-free Instagram is now a distant memory, much like the once ad-free Facebook itself. Soon, users of its Messenger app will begin to see advertisements, too — and WhatsApp may not be too far behind.
Welcome to the Facebook ad creep.
The world’s biggest social media company has squeezed about as many ads onto its main platform as it can. The fancy term for this is “ad load,” and Facebook warned investors back in 2016 that it has pretty much maxed it out. Put any more ads in front of users and they might start complaining — or worse, just leave.
As such, Facebook, a free service that relies almost completely on ads to make money, has to keep finding new and creative ways to let businesses hawk their stuff on its properties.
One solution is to spread ads beyond Facebook itself, onto the other popular messaging and photosharing apps it owns.
So far, it’s working. On Wednesday, Facebook posted a 71 percent increase in quarterly net income to $3.89 billion.
The Menlo Park, Calif.based company’s monthly active user base grew 17 percent to 2.01 billion.
Instagram: Ads began arriving on Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012 for $1 billion, in 2013. It was a slow and careful rollout, and tells a lot about Facebook’s subsequent ad strategy.
The company didn’t want to upset Instagram’s loyal fans, who were used to scrolling through beautiful landscapes, stylized breakfast shots and wellgroomed kittens in their feed. An ad for headache pills would have interrupted the flow. So Instagram started off with just a few ads it considered “beautiful,” selected from handpicked businesses.
Four years later, things have changed a bit, although to Instagram’s credit, not so much as to alienate significant numbers of its 700 million users (up from 100 million in 2013). There are more ads now, and while many could still be called “beautiful,” users are also likely to see generic ads not specifically created for Instagram.
Messenger: Facebook has already been testing ads on its primary chat app, and earlier this month it announced it will expand this test globally. Paralleling its experience with Instagram, Facebook told developers and businesses they can start showing ads — specifically for brands that people “love” or that offer an “opportunity to discover experiences” — to Messenger’s 1.2 billion users. WhatsApp and more: With its popularity outside the U.S. and in developing countries, WhatsApp might be a harder nut to crack when it comes to ads. But there are signs it’s coming. It’s true that WhatsApp’s CEO Jan Koum promised users they can count on “absolutely no ads interrupting your communication” when Facebook bought the company in 2014 for $19 billion.
But last August, WhatsApp updated its privacy policy to reflect that the service would be sharing user data with Facebook so that it could “offer better friend suggestions” and “show you more relevant ads” on Facebook and its other properties.