Facebook to put adverts in Messenger after running out of space in News Feed

They'll start rolling out in the next few weeks

The company has been testing Messenger ads in Thailand and Australia since January (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

Facebook is going to start pushing more adverts out to users, the company has revealed.

It’s set to introduce ads to Messenger, its chat platform, which Facebook users have to install in order to message other users.

The company has hinted that it’s close to maxing out the total number of ads it can squeeze into people’s News Feeds, and adding more of them to Messenger appears to be its solution.

Fortunately, the ads themselves won’t sit inside conversations, but appear between the threads in your inbox.

Tapping them will either take you to the company’s website or their Messenger chatbot, which Facebook has been trying hard to push over the last year.

The company has been testing Messenger ads in Thailand and Australia since January, and described the tests as “promising”.

It will roll ads out to Messenger users gradually, reports Business Insider, starting within the next few weeks.

Last year, Facebook chief financial officer Dave Wehner admitted that the company was about to hit the limit of how many ads it can squeeze into users' News Feeds.

“As I mentioned last quarter, we continue to expect ad load will play a less significant role driving revenue growth after mid-2017,” he said last November.

“Over the past two years we have averaged about 50 per cent compound revenue growth in advertising. Ad load has been one of the three primary factors fuelling that growth. With a much smaller contribution from this important factor going forward, we expect to see ad revenue growth rates come down meaningfully.”

He’d also hinted at the same thing three months earlier, saying: “The optimal ad load is really a mix of art and science.

"We also want to be thoughtful about making sure each person’s overall feed experience has the right balance of organic and ad content.”