Nine months after Facebook Messenger Lite was first launched in Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Venezuela, and about three months after it was expanded to 150 additional countries, it has finally arrived in India. Messenger Lite, which is targeted at people/markets with "slower-than-average Internet speeds and a prevalence of basic Android smartphones", is under 10MB in size and is available in the Play Store. Messenger Lite is just like the Facebook Lite app launched in June 2015, which uses less data and is designed for 2G networks and areas with slow or unstable connections. As of March 2016, Facebook Lite had crossed 100 million users worldwide. While, Messenger had crossed the 1 billion monthly active users mark back in July 2016. Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it will start placing ads in its Messenger app’s home tab screen globally, for a small percentage of users towards the end of July. These ads were first tested in Australia and Thailand this January. Apart from this, Messenger will also have ‘sponsored messages’ which will allow advertisers to directly interact with users through a chat window. The company had started monetizing via Messenger since September last year. It allowed businesses to build Messenger bots and communicate to users directly. Note that Facebook makes almost 85% of its revenue from mobile ads. It's worth noting that during Facebook's F8 developer conference, in April, the company had also said that Messenger can now be used as a Telephone directory for finding new users and as a digital Yellow Pages book for finding new businesses and services. More…
