Bitcoin Surges Following Trump Win

Anthony Wallace / AFP / Getty Images

While the market meltdown some feared following a Donald Trump win in the presidential election hasn't taken place — the major US indices are hovering down less than 1 percent this morning — one currency has seen a major bounce since it became clear last night that Trump was likely to be the country&039;s next President:

Bitcoin.

The seven-year-old cryptocurrency shot up $30 to $738 per BTC, before settling back down around $722, where it sits right now. That&039;s up nearly 2 percent today. The reason? According to Chris Burniske, blockhain products lead at the investment house ARK Invest, money floods to bitcoin in times of market instability.

“In many ways, people are treating it as gold 2.0.”

“In many ways, people are treating it as gold 2.0,” Burniske said. “Time and again over the past year, whether it was during the yuan devaluation or Brexit, whenever we have these shocks to capital markets, you see people turning to Bitcoin. It&039;s a disaster hedge.”

Bitcoin is relatively small. Its market cap — around 11.5 billion dollars — makes it slightly less valuable than Twitter. It&039;s largely free from capital controls, and is driven by an independent group of investors from around the world. According to Burniske, these factors leave the currency uncorrelated with other capital markets. In other words, it&039;s an attractive asset to buy when larger global assets are volatile. (It&039;s worth noting that the price of gold is also up more than a percentage point today.)

While many previous Bitcoin spikes have been driven by investment from China, the money flowing into the cryptocurrency last night and today seems to be coming from US-based investors. According to Burniske, the volume on the five biggest Bitcoin-US Dollar exchanges is triple today what it was Monday.

What a Trump presidency will mean for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general is unclear. The policies section of the Trump/Pence website makes no mention of digital currencies. But if Trump governs with the capriciousness that he campaigned, it stands to reason that the markets could follow. And that will ultimately be good for whatever asset is most insulated from that volatility.

And today, that seems to be bitcoin.

Quelle: <a href="Bitcoin Surges Following Trump Win“>BuzzFeed

Tech Is Freaking Out About A Possible Trump Win

Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images

As some analysts begin projecting a Trump win, tech&#039;s bigwigs are panicking on Twitter and in interviews with BuzzFeed News.

Aside from Peter Thiel, a major Trump backer, tech has almost universally favored Clinton this election. In fact, opposing Trump became a cause that united a large portion of Silicon Valley.

Pishevar, a high-profile venture capitalist who cofounded Sherpa Capital, is also a cofounder of the transportation startup Hyperloop One.

Y Combinator&039;s Sam Altman, who cofounded a civic engagement nonprofit called VotePlz this election to encourage young people to vote, told BuzzFeed News that “I am officially very worried.”

Dennis Crowley, cofounder of Foursquare, also Tweeted his anxieties.

“People were very active trying to support Hillary for president, but I don&039;t think they&039;ve chewed on the prospect of a Trump presidency as imminent,” Keith Rabois, an investment partner at Khosla Ventures, told BuzzFeed News, explaining the anxiety. “So like everybody else, they&039;re probably processing it in real time right now.”

“Just look at your Twitter feed or look at my Twitter feed, which is mostly Silicon Valley people. It was totally divorced from reality,” Rabois said. “Everyone I know in Silicon Valley is in shock.”

Bordetsky works in business development at Uber.

Catherine Bracy, co-founder and executive director of the Oakland-based TechEquity Collaborative, told BuzzFeed News there are “still lots of votes out and paths to victory.”

“I think people need to stop freaking out (even though I am definitely freaking out),” said Bracy, who worked as a program manager for Tech4Obama in 2012.

Paul Graham, cofounder of the incubator Y Combinator, struck a slightly different tone.

“I have a board meeting at 9AM,” Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Slack, said. “I do not anticipate sticking to the original agenda is Trump wins.”

This is a developing story. We will update as we get more reactions.

Quelle: <a href="Tech Is Freaking Out About A Possible Trump Win“>BuzzFeed

The Origin Of Twitter's Election Site

Ryan Carver / Via Flickr: 47882233@N00

In September 2008, Twitter was at a tipping point and a time of great transition. Once a plaything of techies and bloggers, it was now a tool that was being rapidly adopted by corporations, celebrities, politicians, and the media. Twitter had 2.5 million users, according to the company at the time, and was growing rapidly — so rapidly that its Fail Whale icon had become a monument to its struggle to keep up. Meanwhile, Twitter was transitioning from desktop to mobile. It was trying to figure out how to monetize, and how to tap into the already-vast river of information flowing through its servers.

One way Twitter thought it might do that was by surfacing conversations taking place around key current events. And in the Fall of 2008, no conversation was hotter than the one occurring around the US Presidential election. For Twitter, that election was a big deal and, in many ways, a defining moment. The company had record traffic day on election day — 1.8 million tweets — and the mood at its headquarters as returns rolled in on November 4 was electric.

This is the story (taken from a larger feature written for WIRED that never ran) of how Twitter first built out a site to take advantage of those election-related conversations, and to showcase them in a way that would let anyone —Twitter user or not — see what people were saying. The URL for that site — election.twitter.com — will go live again tonight; it&#039;s where BuzzFeed News will broadcast our live election news show (a first for us).

Within just a few weeks of the events described below, Twitter would oust then CEO Jack Dorsey, and replace him with another co-founder, Ev Williams. And with that, Twitter&039;s first era — one defined by the desktop, Dorsey, and a historic election —would come to a close. Tonight, as Twitter is again helmed by Dorsey and we stand on the precipice of another historic election, it seemed like a good time to look back at where it all began.

Ev Williams is bored out of his shoes. The 37-year-old cofounder of Twitter is sitting at the head of a table in his San Francisco offices, clad in a T-shirt, blue jeans, and striped socks. He is surrounded by seven Twitter employees — techies, engineers, support staff. It has been two long years since launching the microblogging tool that lets users broadcast 140-character messages to networks of followers, and during that time the service has grown from a curiosity to a full-fledged communications platform. It has been an exciting process, but it has also led to some not-so-exciting usability issues, the kind that need to be hammered out in long, dull meetings. Meetings like this one.

The subject today: spam. Mass marketers and search engine optimizers are signing up for accounts, duping users into following them and then sending out barrages of useless links. Twitter staffers dive eagerly into the intricacies of the problem. They discuss how to freeze accounts that add too many followers too rapidly. They weigh whether they should enable people to rank one another by reputation. And they toss around the best ways to identify and filter out links that lead to known spam sites. “We could also use that as a freedom-and-democracy filter when we expand into China,” a product manager named Jason Goldman jokes.

The room fills with laughter, but Williams remains silent. As the meeting pushes past the hour mark, he folds his legs beneath him and squats in his chair. He plunges his face into his hands, rubs his eyes, and sighs loudly. He checks his BlackBerry. After about 90 minutes, he abruptly announces he has another meeting and hustles out.

Williams pops into a conference room next door, where Jeffrey Veen awaits. It’s early September, and everyone’s minds are on the upcoming election. Twitter, aiming to capitalize on the excitement, has contracted Veen, a storied Web architect, to build election.twitter.com. Veen and his team have been at it for a couple of days, and now he is ready to show some mock-ups. The idea is to filter election-related posts from Twitter’s raw feed, and display them in a real-time stream.

A constantly updated flow of political posts will cascade down the center of the screen, while tables and graphs will show which candidates are generating the most chatter. Ultimately, the site could be hugely useful for tracking how the news of the day affects what people are saying about the candidates in real time; an immersive CAT scan of the political hive mind. It’s very slick stuff.

Williams is not bored anymore; quite the opposite. His eyes bulge, and a goofy grin spreads across his face. He jumps up to sketch ideas on the whiteboard. And this time, when Veen tries out a rather bland joke (“One thing we found: No one talks about Joe Biden”) Williams laughs uproariously.

You can’t blame Williams for preferring Veen’s gee-whiz performance to the plodding anti-spam meeting. It is much more fun to ponder Twitter’s potential to reshape modern communication than to deal with the nuts-and- bolts details of creating a safe and secure platform.

In the 2016 election cycle, instead of spam and Fail Whales, Twitter found itself struggling with sluggish growth and online harassment. Yet, despite that, it remained at the center of the election, driving news of the day and serving as a vital information hub. This evening, election.twitter.com is live once again, home to BuzzFeed News and Twitter&039;s live Election Night special – “We Did It, America.”

Quelle: <a href="The Origin Of Twitter&039;s Election Site“>BuzzFeed

How Macedonian Spammers Are Using Facebook Groups To Feed You Fake News

BuzzFeed News / Getty Images

This summer, just after the Democratic National Convention ended, John Mattes noticed a sudden influx of new people asking to join his San Diego Berniecrats Facebook group. Mattes approved them and soon came to regret it. The accounts started spamming his Bernie Sanders group with links to anti-Hillary Clinton articles from strange websites he’d never heard of.

“Around the time that Hillary collapsed in public, our page became increasingly populated with fake stories full of Hillary hate,” Mattes told BuzzFeed News. “People were accusing Hillary of murdering opponents. It was alleged that she utilized body doubles.”

Mattes, a lawyer, former journalist, and former Investigative Counsel to the US Senate, investigated the Facebook accounts and the sites they were promoting. What he found was that the websites being promoted were run by people in Veles, a town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Some of the Facebook profiles also listed that as their location.

John Mattes / Via facebook.com

Mattes reached out to BuzzFeed News after reading a report about 140 US politics websites based in the small Macedonian town of Veles, including sites propagating false and misleading pro-Trump content. And his experience cast a light on how fake news has polluted not just the news feeds of millions of Facebook users, but also another popular feature of the network: Groups for people who share a common cause.

Two other people reached out and told the same story of how obviously fake Facebook profiles joined Facebook groups dedicated to different interests and then spammed them with links to websites operated from Macedonia.

“These exploiters will use anything to make money,” said Sarah Thompson, a mother of four who homeschools her kids on a farm in Indiana. After noticing suspicious posts being shared in Facebook groups about horses, she too began investigating their origin and ended up discovering hundreds of fake Facebook profiles that were promoting websites run by people in that same Macedonian town.

Even the owner of 10 fake news websites in the US contacted BuzzFeed News to express his frustration with the onslaught of Macedonian spam in pro-Trump Facebook groups.

Thompson says the politics sites are just one part of the network of fake Facebook profiles and clickbait sites originating in the former Yugoslav Republic and in other Eastern European countries.

“The story is not the election,” she said. “It&#039;s how Facebook is being played.”

As BuzzFeed News previously revealed, this same technique of posting links from fake accounts was used to spread hoax news articles about terrorist attacks in cities in the US, Canada, UK and elsewhere. Those sites were run by people in the republic of Georgia. Both that scam and the sites run out of Macedonia utilize fake Facebook accounts to share their content in groups to help it get shared on Facebook. They then monetize any resulting traffic through ads on their websites, or, as was the case in Georgia, they attempt to install malware on user’s computers.

Evan Blair, the co-founder of social media security company ZeroFox, said the tactic is widely used by cybercriminals.

“The tactics that are being employed are utilized on a massive scale by very large and well-organized and well-funded cybercriminal groups,” Blair said, adding that he could not comment of the level of organization and sophistication of the people operating out of Veles.

“Misrepresenting yourself on Facebook is against our policies, and we have a dedicated team that&039;s tasked with helping to detect and block fake accounts,” a Facebook spokesman told BuzzFeed News.

The company also said that content it identifies as being “hoaxes or having misinformation get decreased distribution in News Feed, whether or not they originate in groups.” However, it also said that the original post to a group would remain online, unless a group administrator chose to remove it.

John Mattes believes the Macedonian operation focused on Bernie Sanders goes beyond a simple money-making scheme.

“What is most disturbing is that the Macedonia stories worked to directly help Trump,” he said. “The stories targeted Sanders supporters, creating doubts about Hillary among a key voting block.”

He’s concerned it was part of a concerted effort to suppress the votes of Sanders supporters in order to help Trump. Mattes says he alerted a contact at the Clinton campaign about the influx of anti-Hillary content, but no one took it seriously.

“Some [of the Sanders supporters] are newly energized democratic voters,” he said. “If you have the ability to suppress and poison the well and reduce participation, that’s a win.”

Other Sanders supporters also apparently took note of the Macedonians. Over the summer a group of them created a public spreadsheet of “Red Flag Spamsites” that highlighted the untrustworthy content coming from Macedonian sites, among others.

Mattes called it “outrageous that foreign elements would tamper with our election.”

But as of now, neither Mattes nor BuzzFeed News have unearthed any evidence that links the spammers to a coordinated campaign to suppress Clinton votes.

Facebook

What we did find is a network of Facebook profiles just like Antonio Markoski’s. His page is mostly empty, except for a profile picture of a man on a horse. That image is stolen from a Daily Telegraph article about a man who was fined after drunkenly riding a horse bareback down the street.

Markowski’s account is almost certainly a fake. The same can be said for most of his nearly 200 friends on Facebook. Their profile photos consist of burly men on motorcycles, attractive young women with or without motorcycles, men with horses, women with horses, and young hipster men. Just about all of Markowski’s friends are also friends with each other. It’s a tight network of fake accounts.

Though his profile’s timeline is largely empty, Markowski has been active. Last month he shared a link to USAPoliticsForum.com in a “Hispanics for Trump” Facebook group. Later he shared a link to a Horses99.com post about showjumping in a Facebook group about horse racing.

Domain registration records show both of those sites, along with others about fishing and motorcycles, are all owned be the same man in Veles. He often posts about creating fake Facebook profiles on an online forum dedicated to black hat SEO practices. Also of note is that the email address used to register those sites is connected to a fake Facebook profile for a woman named Elena Nikolov. Her profile photo shows woman with a motorcycle that is in fact a picture of Venezuelan model Aida Yespica. And she is friends with many of the same people as the Markowski profile.

When contacted by BuzzFeed News, the owner of the domains declined to speak. (Only one of the Macedonians running US politics sites who previously spoke to BuzzFeed News answered questions about fake accounts, and he said he only uses his own profile to share links to his site.) But a simple search on Facebook for the domains of this man’s fishing, horses, and politics sites reveals a pattern of links being shared into groups by fake accounts. The same is true for other sites based in Veles that are owned by other people.

Sarah Thompson / Via facebook.com

Sarah Thompson said her months of online research revealed a network of at least hundreds of fake profiles that promote a wide range of websites, some of which are based in other Eastern European countries.

“I reported over 250 [fake profiles] in the course of a week,” she said, estimating that Facebook removed 75% of them.

Mattes and Thompson both say the Macedonian spammers continue to wreak havoc. Mattes said his Facebook group splintered along pro- and anti-Hillary lines and lost members. “By September, Bernie supporters had left our page in droves, depressed and disgusted by the venom,” he said.

Thompson is disheartened to see so many people in her horse groups fall for fake stories and clickbait.

“I have a sense of right and wrong which is very offended by cheating,” she said. “So when I encountered the fakers on Facebook, it made me so mad that they can be getting away with what they’re getting away with.”

Thompson says her months of tracking fake accounts and clickbait sites on Facebook also resulted in an unexpected personal consequence. She believes Facebook’s news feed algorithm is now feeding her spam-like content because it thinks that’s what she wants to read.

“I believe I am getting a lower quality content in my feed,” she said. “I’m getting spammier and trashier shares from my friends because I’m spending so much time going to these other pages.”

Quelle: <a href="How Macedonian Spammers Are Using Facebook Groups To Feed You Fake News“>BuzzFeed

Fox News’ Election Night Advantage Is A Video Chandelier

Fox News

While standing directly in the center of Fox News’ brand new two-story election night studio, I became a bit overwhelmed. Under my feet, thousands of LED lights had transformed the floor into a gently rotating royal blue presidential seal. To my left, a twenty-something foot vertical screen displayed every state and when its polls closed. To my right, a 31-foot long LED wall showed an oscillating, urgent electoral “ALERT” before a new graphic flashed into its place, projecting a shiny gold six-foot tall map of Indiana. Just above my peripheral vision, a red news ticker rimming the 2,200 square feet of exterior windows cycled through logos and breaking news. And just above that, the coup de grace: a 528 square foot, circular “video chandelier” that beamed the words “AMERICA’S ELECTION NIGHT HEADQUARTERS” in action movie opening credits lettering, against alternating red, white, and blue backgrounds. Test tweets flashed. Electoral projection animations whizzed. Touch screens were touched. It all felt like standing inside some kind of uncanny, aggressively patriotic space station.

Tonight at 6 pm, Fox News will likely welcome more than 10 million viewers into that space station, which the network is unveiling for the broadcast it calls“our Superbowl.” Embattled after a summer in which founding chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes was forced out over sexual harassment allegations, Fox News is using its election night broadcast and new, reportedly $30 million studio to make a statement. Namely, that it is still a monolithic, indestructible media titan, capable of out-pixeling and out-spending rivals new and old. The message: We are the Titanic and we are invulnerable.

“It’s a bit of sensory overload, right?” Alan Komissaroff, senior executive producer for Fox’s election night broadcast said of the set — which, just a few years ago, was a Charles Schwab branch. “There’s so much information to bring in — house races, senate races, exit polls — throughout the night but you have to present it differently, otherwise it gets boring and now we have dozens of ways to do that.” When I asked Komissaroff if all the extremely pricey bells and whistles and pixels were essential to the election team’s success this evening, he laughed. “Is it necessary?” he said, gesturing upward to the looming video chandelier, which had begun to whirr in preparation to lower to the ground. “Well, it looks really good.”

The video chandelier tests out tweets 30 hours before showtime.

Charlie Warzel/BuzzFeed News

And while the video chandelier is likely to be the object of a few laughs on Twitter, it does look pretty good. More importantly, it represents an investment few (if any) media outlets could pull off. Fox News is a titanic force, thanks in part to Donald Trump and an unprecedented election cycle; the network recently reported record revenues: an estimated $2.62 billion in 2016. The past year may have been tough for Fox spiritually, but at least the ratings have been great, starting in 2015 when its first GOP debate pulled in 24 million viewers.

Fox is no stranger to big ratings — it led cable news during 2012’s election night broadcasts with 11 million viewers. But the network has more to prove this cycle. Among the concerns: 1) Megyn Kelly, an election night anchor and arguably the network’s biggest star, whose contract is due up next year and is reportedly seeking north of $20 million per year; 2) The slow recovery from the fallout of the Ailes ouster, which has cast a shadow of uncertainty as to the network’s direction in the coming years; 3) It&#039;s audience is growing perilously older by the year —with a median viewer age of 67 in 2015 (CNN&039;s was 61); and 4) An increasingly sinister brand of media criticism and distrust from Trump supporters, from which Fox News is not exempt. (Two weeks ago, Trump surrogate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich railed against Kelly for displaying bias against the Republican candidate).

A cascading 20-plus foot screen that Fox employees call “the Twitter wall.”

It was amid that chaos that rumors began to surface of the prospect of Trump extending his brand into video news. And despite the candidate’s insistence that he has no plans, those rumors have continually inched closer to reality. Three weeks ago, the Financial Times reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was in the early phases of shopping a Trump TV network. Just a day later,Trump’s official Facebook page hosted a pre- and post- livestream debate event, complete with graphics and chyrons — perhaps Trump TV’s inaugural broadcast. It was viewed 9 million times. Since then, Trump TV has spent the last two weeks conducting nightly news broadcasts over Facebook Live from Trump Tower with advisors and campaign staffers. The campaign has even set aside a camera spot for “Trump TV” at the candidate’s election night party headquarters.

Despite the myriad challenges facing a potential Trump TV venture (including Trump’s own interest level and the discipline to fund and follow through on it, and the fact that it would likely have to be a streaming subscription service — a business model that’s notoriously tough to crack) the rumors and the attendant buzz around a new offering suggest a desire in a certain branch of the right for a different flavor of cable news. One more like Breitbart (previously run by Trump’s campaign CEO Steve Bannon), which more closely mirrors Trump’s brash, alt-right oriented movement.

Fox’s election night broadcast marks an important 20 year anniversary. Yet it’s also a moment for the network to flex its muscle against both its traditional rivals — like CNN and MSNBC — and a crop of new online programming debuting from the likes of MTV, Vice, and others (including BuzzFeed News, which will broadcast an election night show live on Twitter). As such, the video chandelier and surplus of gorgeous HD touch screens are a not-so-subtle gesture toward Fox&039;s war chest and elite subscription fee revenues and soaring advertising rates —30 second ad spots for the Fox News&039; second primary debate sold for as much as $260,000 last year.

And while the LED lights and banners make for a great backdrop, they also represent a crucial tension that will play out on media&039;s biggest stages for the next few years as incumbent networks try to spend new media into oblivion while their audiences skew increasingly older. In many ways, Fox reflects the challenge facing all the incumbent cable networks: Is money enough to fend of rising digital challengers?

“I think you’d be naive not to see the future of the media as moving onto all kinds of platforms,” Martha MacCallum, a co-host of Fox&039;s America&039;s Newsroom, said. “I think competition is healthy but people tune in to us is because they feel a connection and they trust us to give the facts to them straight.” MacCallum, who will lead the network’s on-air exit polls analysis, stressed that while there may be increased frustrations with the media, Fox News&039; reporters, researchers, and decision desk, provide the necessary perspective to cut through its viewers’ online filter bubbles and echo chambers.

Trump TV&039;s trial balloon broadcast after the third debate.

When asked about any worry of an insurgent Trump TV, MacCallum was quick to dismiss it as partisan noise. “I’m no more concerned with the idea than, say, a Newsmax or Breitbart, which are already out there and fit into that filter bubble category,” she said.

MacCallum’s co-host and election night companion Bill Hemmer echoed the point. “I think with the technology available today there are more outlets able to experiment but it’s not very easy to do what we do,” he explained from his election night perch on the second floor of the new studio. “There&039;s a lot of nuance to it. I read all the trades and I see what people trying to do and what they’re saying [with regard to Trump TV] — but I think the point to be made is that it’s a lot more difficult than it looks.”

With 30 hours and ten thousand things to test before air, that difficulty was on display behind the scenes. As Hemmer spoke, a half dozen contractors drilled and hammered finishing pieces into place, while the crew adjusted and tweaked settings on the set’s 14 cameras. Producers cycled in and out, frantically constantly prodding the 34 touch screens to zoom in on precincts and counties and trigger any number of flashy animations. Lights cycled and oscillated, cycling through color sequences and — at one point — a test tweet as big as my body popped up on the video chandelier. It all felt incredibly complex, dizzying, and expensive. And while it will most likely draw tens of millions more eyes than Trump’s public access-style live show or many of the stripped down online broadcasts, it’s unclear how much the $30 million dollar competitive advantage really means to anxious viewers at home trying to watch the returns.

As Hemmer sees it, the evening’s production value will send a clear message to viewers. “One of the best ways to display the gravity of the night is to demonstrate the power of TV which, despite all the advances of technology, is still a number one source. It’s the reason why you have tens of millions watching tomorrow.”

From the control room — in between finding the perfect moments to raise and lower and show America his video chandelier — Komissaroff may keep an eye on what the smaller players are up to, but he’s not concerned. As a news producer, Facebook Live and any number of other nascent broadcasts are new resources for him to utilize, made all the more important to the newsgathering process by the fact that presidential candidates are using them.

As for his thoughts on Trump’s little broadcast experiments? “I honestly haven’t even thought about it, but I’m not worried about it. It’s not the same thing. We’re a news organization,” he said. “Plus, I think our graphics look better.”

Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed News

Quelle: <a href="Fox News’ Election Night Advantage Is A Video Chandelier“>BuzzFeed

Here's Facebook's Plan To Get You Chatting With Messenger Business Bots

Getty Images

Since Facebook debuted its bot platform for Messenger in April of this year, the messaging app has been flooded with some 33,000 chat bots. But after six months at market, they&#039;re still largely unproven. Many Messenger bots are clunky and difficult to use, and those that aren&039;t can be difficult to find. Now Facebook is moving to change that with some tactical product tweaks rolling out today.

The first tweak is a simple one: News Feed advertisements designed to engage you in conversation with a chat bot. Let&039;s say H&M is touting a new line of winter coats in a Facebook ad campaign. Instead of directing people interested in the coats to H&M&039;s website or the H&M app, these ads would put them in conversation with Messenger&039;s H&M chat bot, which could answer questions about the coats and potentially orchestrate an in-app sale. These ads roll out globally today.

“We now have the ability to drive massive traffic to bots through News Feed.”

Facebook&039;s second tweak, sponsored messages, also rolls out globally today. These are exactly what they say on the tin: branded in-Messenger messages sent to Messenger users by advertisers they&039;ve interacted with in the past. Together with bot-integrated News Feed ads, these new products offer developers opportunities to more proactively engage people on Facebook.

“We now have the ability to drive massive traffic to bots through News Feed,” Facebook Messenger head David Marcus told BuzzFeed News, “and that&039;s great for developers.” Marcus noted that these new products have worked well in test runs. Absolut Vodka, for example, recently used a bot-integrated News Feed ad as part of a vodka giveaway campaign. Marcus said the company found that acceptance rates on Messenger were three times what they were on the mobile web.

Which is not to say that Facebook views sponsored messages or bot-integrated News Feed ads as a huge business opportunity. Indeed, Marcus cautioned that while they will certainly increase Facebook&039;s ad capacity, they&039;re probably not going to drive ad load growth. “Sponsored Messages probably are not going to be big,” he said, “but they&039;re a needed capability.” And a crucial piece of Facebook&039;s strategy to cash in on the purchase intent inspired on its platform. Think of it this way: Facebook views News Feed as a place to discover things you want to buy, and it&039;s conceived of Messenger as the place where you actually buy them.

Facebook has other plans for Messenger as well, though none that Marcus was willing to discuss in detail. Asked if we might someday see Messenger crib features from Snapchat in a manner similar to what Facebook did with Instagram and WhatsApp, Marcus declined to answer, but then observed that messaging is becoming more visual and his team is experimenting with new stuff all the time. “We have more and more photos that are shared inside of Messenger every day,” he said. “So are we actually working on stuff that will make messaging more visual across the board? Sure.”

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s Facebook&039;s Plan To Get You Chatting With Messenger Business Bots“>BuzzFeed