You forget, Facebook's customers are not its users; they are assets whose access they are selling to their actual customers, ad agencies and marketers. Adverti

You forget, Facebook's customers are not its users; they are assets whose access they are selling to their actual customers, ad agencies and marketers. Advertising made up nearly 97% of Facebook's revenue in Q1 2016[0]. Messenger and messaging is something Facebook has not previously monetized, and I would presume this is part of Facebook's plan to monetize messenger by releasing ads on it in Q2 2016[1]. This all makes perfect sense if messaging in the Facebook app is used by few enough of its users that the cost of maintaining and monetizing it would be greater than ad revenue it could generate, which seems reasonable to me. So, in fact, they are only improving their products and services for their paying customers, advertisers. I'm rather confidant that Facebook would not be doing this if its users were its paying customers. [0] http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=967167 http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=967167 [1] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/18/facebook-messenger-ads/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/18/facebook-messenger-ads/