David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
At its developers' conference next month, Facebook plans to announce a way for news publishers to automatically send users content through Messenger, sources tell Marketing Land.
In other words, Facebook's chat app will also become a newsreader of sorts.
That might seem odd, given that Facebook's main social network already provides users with a newsfeed that's chock full of news articles. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said he wants to the social network's newsfeed to be a "personalized newspaper" for every person in the world.
Huge reach
But Zuckerberg is also on a mission to bolster Facebook's family of standalone apps. And with 800 million users, the Messenger app makes for a powerful news distribution platform - especially since it started allowing businesses to communicate with Facebook users in August 2015.
German newspaper Bild (owned by Business Insider parent company Axel Springer) has already tested a "Bild Ticker" Facebook Page that sent news stories to people who started a message thread with it.
Facebook is also reportedly prepping to start letting those businesses pay to send Messenger blasts to users it's chatted with before. It's unclear whether there will be any immediate monetization possibilities for publishers through Messenger, or if they'll have to pay at all.
"Facebook aggressively moving to become a fully-fledged ecosystem," writes Edison Investment Research analyst Richard Windsor in reaction to the publisher news.
Facebook
The company first announced the goal of allowing developers to build more functionality and features into the chat app back at its 2015 F8 conference.
It launched with 40 app integrations on its Messenger Platform, which has since swelled to about 65, including notable new integrations from Spotify and Uber.
Facebook declined to comment on its plan to expand publishers' Messenger capabilities.