Facebook has hinted at its plans to monetise the two messaging apps in its portfolio, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

In the earnings call that accompanied Facebooks Q2 results, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company was following a similar strategy

“If you go back to 2006 and 2007, there were a lot of people who were kind of encouraging us to just put banner ads and kind of inorganic content into the experience,” he said. “And what we decided was that over the long term, the ads and monetisation would perform better if there was an organic interaction between people using the product and businesses.”

In the case of Facebook, this came in the form of Pages, which were available for free to brands and individuals alike, and WhatsApp and Messaging look set to follow a similar pattern. Its still not clear exactly what form this will take, but expect to see an organic business-to-person communication product announced in the near future.

“Were working on a lot of different things that make it so that people can get value from interacting with businesses,” said Zuckerberg.

“The long term bet is that, by enabling people to have good organic interactions with businesses, that will end up being a massive multiplier on the value of the monetisation down the road when we work on that and really focus on that in a bigger way.”

Facebook is certainly in a good position to monetise these products. Messenger and WhatsApp have over 700m and 800m monthly active users respectively, each more than double Instagrams 300m.