THE PRESIDENT OF eBay’s PayPal David Marcus, will be leaving the company to become Facebook’s vice president of messaging products.
Marcus’s role will be to run Messenger, which functions both as a feature on Facebook’s site and as a standalone app, but he won’t oversee WhatsApp, the instant messaging service Facebook agreed to buy for $19 billion back in February.
Marcus joined PayPal in 2011 as vice president for mobile, and was responsible for leading its mobile payments business, before he took on the role of president the following year.
The move could tie into Facebook’s efforts to become a financial service, which would allow users to store money on the site and use it to pay and exchange money with others.
Facebook said that 12 billion messages are sent through its messenger service every day and around 200 million people use it every month. By contrast, WhatsApp has more than 500 million users.
In a statement, Facebook said it was “excited by the potential to continue developing great new messaging experiences that better serve the Facebook community and reach even more people, and David will be leading these efforts.”
The change will happen at the end of June, where eBay’s CEO John Donahoe will lead the division on an interim basis.
Also, Instagram will begin rolling out its ads service to countries outside the US. For now, three more English speaking countries: Britain, Canada and Australia, will start seeing sponsored posts and the company hopes to bring these ads to other countries in the near future.
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