Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) may have hit the one billion mark long ago, but its offspring is taking its first full steps into the three-comma club. That is to say, Facebook Messenger just hit its first billion users.
It’s not really much of a surprise, as Facebook did kind of make using its social networking site a tough pill to swallow without the ability to message those precious friends.
To do so, you’d need Messenger, which sort of makes it Facebook’s evil twin (if you buy into the science fiction that things split from the original are often evil).
FB Stock and Messenger Growth
Evil or not, Messenger’s user growth has doubled in less than two years. Back in April 2014, Messenger was at a lonely 200 million users; it grew to 500 million by November of that same year and added another 200 million by June 2015.
And with that user growth comes valuable data mining: Messenger users send each other a total of 17 billion photos each month, 380 stickers, 22 million GIFs and 1 billion plain vanilla messages.
But the reason this is good news for FB stock (which finished the day with a 1.09% gain) is because the more users Messenger has, the more power FB has to attract brands and business, compete with PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:PYPL) in e-commerce and even help FB quickly deliver news.
Messenger already sports a scary 18,000 bots (so businesses can leave the dirty business of talking to their customers to the unconscious) and 23,000 developers. According to Facebook’s head of Messenger, David Marcus:
“… there’s a pretty high percentage of people that you want to talk to that are on one platform and you don’t need a phone number but you can find them by name and you can send more things and go live with audio and video … it’s becoming an important communication tool for the world.”
As of this writing, John Kilhefner did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
