Facebook says Messenger now has 1.3B monthly active users, up from 1.2B in April, while Messenger Day has 70M daily active users
FB) users hate change — that's just a fact. — Back in 2014, many users became incensed when Facebook Messenger was spun out into a separate app people …
Context & Ripple Effects
Messenger's climb has been steady and well-documented: 700M monthly users in mid-2015, 1B by July 2016, and now 1.3B as of this report — roughly +100M per quarter at each checkpoint. The new number matters less than what rides alongside it: Messenger Day, Facebook's Stories-format clone, claiming 70M daily users just months after launch.
That Daily figure is the strategic payload. A year later, Facebook reported Facebook and Messenger Stories hitting a combined 300M DAUs and began rolling ads into the format — making this September 2017 snapshot the first public evidence that the cloned format had found an audience inside Messenger fast enough to justify a monetization pipeline.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains a second large-scale daily-engagement surface inside Messenger: 70M people opening Messenger Day daily gives the company a fresh canvas for the Stories-ad products it would soon roll out globally.
Second-order effects
- Once Stories engagement scales across both apps, ad inventory shifts toward the full-screen vertical format — the 2018 global Stories-ads rollout converts Messenger Day's audience directly into revenue-generating placements competing for the same brand budgets as feed ads.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — clone a rival's format, seed it across every owned app, then attach ads once DAU is proven — messaging platforms stop being pure utility and become ad networks in their own right, with feature velocity driven by monetization timelines rather than user requests.
The trend: Messaging apps are being converted from communication utilities into ad-supported media surfaces, with cloned Stories formats serving as the bridge product.