On Tuesday word got out that BlackBerry were considering featuring in-app advertisements to monetise BlackBerry Messenger. It was disclosed in fairly vague terms in a message sent to BBM beta testers that ads may soon feature within BBM channels – it turns out that that might not be the case.
Head of BBM product marketing Jeff Gadway, obviously mindful of the public’s overwhelmingly negative reaction to the potential changes, has reacted fast to clarify the situation (sort of). He posted a blog entry on the official BlackBerry website wherein he tried his best to use as many words as possible to clarify a fairly simple point.
To save you the trouble of trawling through it, here’s the skinny: Advertising will not infiltrate chats. At all. Your private chat screens shall remain untarnished. There are three ways in which you will be advertised to, though. First off, channel owners will be able to promote their channel via a Featured Channels tab. This sounds reasonable enough – imagine it working similarly to how sponsored tweets on twitter have a big orange symbol and text saying ‘SPONSORED TWEET’ directly above it.
Secondly, there’s ‘Sponsored Invites’. A little more intrusive, these are direct invites from one Channel owner to the user, inviting them to join their Channel. Whilst they’re allegedly clearly labelled as sponsored, they still appear directly in your invites tab.
Finally, ‘sponsored posts’ are now a thing. Yes, that does appear to be a fairly creative way of saying ‘advertisements’. These adpost sponsortisements will appear directly within your Updates tab, alongside posts from your actual friends and subscriptions. Gadway says that users are always looking for new channels to discover, and new ways in which to discover them. We’re not sure this is quite what people had in mind, Jeff.
BlackBerry call these upcoming changes ‘relevant, unobtrusive and engaging’. A rollout date is yet to be announced. Thoughts?
