Facebook Just Took a Huge Step Toward Monetizing WhatsApp

Facebook's (NASDAQ: FB) efforts to monetize WhatsApp -- the messaging app it paid $19 billion for in 2014 -- have been delayed and rethought several times over by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his management team. Plans to place advertisements in WhatsApp Status were suspended earlier this year and efforts to launch a payments platform in India have hit a roadblock.

But WhatsApp payments is finally launching. Not in India, but Brazil, WhatsApp's second-largest market by users. The service is built on Facebook Pay, which the company plans to use as the foundation to support payments across all of its apps. As e-commerce becomes a bigger part of Facebook's business, WhatsApp payments represents a major step toward monetizing WhatsApp's 2 billion users.

Image source: Facebook.

Continue reading

Source Fool.com