Brace yourself: More ads are coming to Facebook Messenger

Get ready to see more ads popping up in Facebook Messenger.

An exec at the social network said Tuesday that it plans to roll out ads to the Messenger home screen worldwide by the end of the year after testing them in Australia and Thailand earlier this year, Venture Beat reports.

The company plans to gradually wean them in as to avoid annoying users with a flood of new ads.

“We’ll start slow,” Facebook's head of product for Messenger, Stan Chudnovsky, said at a conference in San Francisco this week. “When the average user can be sure to see them we truly don’t know because we’re just going to be very data-driven and user feedback-driven on making that decision.”

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

A single ad will appear about halfway down the central hub of the Messenger app, a slight change from the carousel-style format the company had previously tested. But Facebook has at least mercifully refrained from inserting ads into your actual conversations -- for the time being, that is.

The space represents some of the last remaining untapped real estate for advertising as Facebook works to keep up its constant growth without smothering its users. Analysts believe the company may be nearing the point where it will start to really feel the squeeze of those constraints.

This isn't the first style of ad Facebook has attempted within Messenger. The company launched an ad format last fall that allowed brands to insert conversational prompts into existing chats with users. As with these new ads, advertisers are only allowed to target people with whom they've communicated before. Facebook also claims it doesn't use information gleaned from private messages for advertising purposes.

This article has been corrected to reflect that Facebook is not rolling out the carousel-style format it announced with the test run.