Facebook’s Messenger surpassed 1.3 billion monthly active users, the communications service revealed on Thursday, adding that its Messenger Day functionality is now also being used by 70 million people on a daily basis. That figure is a relatively promising one for a product that’s only been introduced on a global level half a year ago, though Messenger Day still isn’t enjoying the same growth rate that Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp are. Messenger’s latest milestone was announced as the service is slowly bringing a rather dynamic year to a close; the introduction of Messenger Day marked an aggressive redesign of the chat app which Facebook refocused into another social media network with messaging capabilities on top of a plethora of other functions like (video) calls, games, payments, and artificial intelligence bots.
Messenger Day itself is largely seen as a clone of Snapchat’s Stories feature which Facebook’s service seemingly adopted in an effort to penetrate markets in which Snapchat is still not dominant, and while the firm hasn’t provided a breakdown of its 70 million daily users, it’s understood that the majority of them are located outside of the United States due to precisely that reason. The app itself boasted a billion users in July 2016, and with its growth slowing down in recent years, it seems that Facebook’s product is slowly reaching maturity and new features may not be enough for it to reach more users in its already highly saturated markets.
Due to the current state of affairs, Facebook may move to monetize Messenger more aggressively in the near future, which is something that its Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg already suggested may happen following the publication of the company’s consolidated financial report for the second quarter of the year. Mr. Zuckerberg previously said that both Messenger and WhatsApp will put a larger focus on monetization going forward and the two recently debuted enterprise-to-consumer communications solutions for which companies can pay for, with Messenger itself also introducing ads. Video is another important component of Messenger that Facebook is adamant to nurture going forward as the social media giant continues its larger push in this segment with the goal of competing with Google’s YouTube.