Facebook Messenger Platform Balloons To 1.2 Billion Monthly Active Users

It seems as though Facebook has been continually improving its Messenger platform over the past few months with little tweaks here and there. All of these feature additions are coming for a good reason — Facebook needs to feed the beast. Facebook’s David Marcus just announced that Messenger now has over 1.2 billion active users per month.

“I keep on hearing powerful stories about how our product is becoming a more important part of your daily lives,” said Marcus. “So from all of us here at Messenger, a heartfelt thank you to all of you for giving us a chance to build something good and more meaningful for you.”

This is a huge accomplishment for the chat application, which had just 200 million monthly active users back in April 2014. Messenger topped 500 million users six months later, and doubled that figure to 1 billion in July 2016. And he we are less than a year later at the 1.2 billion mark.

Last week, Facebook opened up its ‘M’ AI assistant to provide helpful suggestions within chats, and in late March it added the ability to let you share your location with friends. Earlier in March, Facebook added Messenger Day and camera stickers/masks.

And today, as it celebrates a new milestone for monthly active users, Facebook has announced Group Payments for Messenger. Starting today on desktop and Android platforms, you can send or receive payments between groups of people — for free. Initiating a payment or request funds is as simple as tapping on the plus sign in a group chat and hitting the $ sign, which initiates the process.

“Enter the amount you want to request per person or the total sum to divide evenly, either including yourself in the calculation or not,” explains Partha Sundaram, Product Manager for Consumer Payments. “Finally, you can specify what the money is for — maybe a pizza party, teacher gift or more. Once you’re ready, tap Request.”

The Messenger platform has grown to become its own full-featured product advertising platform for Facebook and is showing no signs of stopping.