Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook’s year-over-year (YoY) revenue from click-to-message ads in India has doubled in the third quarter ended September 2023. Zuckerberg said this during a call with analysts on October 26.
The CEO also mentioned that that more than 60 percent of WhatsApp users in India message a business app account every week.
During the earnings conference call, Zuckerberg said he believes business messaging will be the next major pillar for the company's business with more than 600 million conversations happening between people and businesses every day on their platforms.
Talking about the trend, Zuckerberg pointed out that the majority of commerce over messaging is currently happening in countries where the "cost of labour is low enough that it makes sense for businesses to have people corresponding with customers over text".
"But in lots of parts of the world, the cost of labour is too expensive for this to be viable. With business AIs, we have the opportunity to bring down that cost and expand commerce in messaging into larger economies across the world," Zuckerberg said.
"Making business AIs work for more businesses is going to be an important focus for us into 2024" Zuckerberg said on the call.
In February 2023, Zuckerberg had said that click-to-message ads had globally hit $10 billion revenue. India is WhatsApp’s biggest market with over 500 million users.
Meta CFO Susan Li said on the call that they witnessed strong revenue growth from business messaging during the quarter. This drove growth in its "Family of Apps other revenue" segment, which houses the company's non-advertising revenue sources from its suite of apps.