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Denver – Facebook announced it will now be running advertisements via the “Shops” feature in Whatsapp and Facebook Marketplace.
The announcement comes as the company seeks to improve its online shopping, or “e-commerce” presence. According to information from the company’s last earnings call, Facebook has over 300 million visitors and 1.2 million active shops on its platform.
In addition to its Shops expansion, Facebook will also be utilizing augmented reality and artificial intelligence to make shopping a more immersive experience. Users will be able to try on clothes from advertisements through these advanced features. Facebook has already tried personalized advertisements in its popular subsidiary instagram, where it already has access to over 1 billion users.
However, the company’s advertisement expansion into Whatsapp is monumental, especially considering the app’s large audience base. Whatsapp is currently the most popular messaging service in over 100 countries, boasting a user base of over 2.5 billion people, with over 5 billion downloads of the app, according to app tracking sites.
This offers a whole new potential audience for Facebook to market to, and more potential advertising revenue to generate from the company’s users. Advertisement revenue for the company rose by about 50% in the past year, and it made about $86 billion last year in advertising revenue alone, according to Statista.
Advertisements currently account for 97.9% of Facebook’s total revenue stream. The recent expansion announcement is a clear indication that the company intends to maximize its advertisement earnings moving into the future, as more firms look to market their products through social media networks.
