Look for the company to invest more in Instagram, Messenger and episodic content.

Even as Facebook continues to fight fake news and tweak its hate speech algorithms, it still remains the world's most popular social network with over 2 billion monthly users as of June. In its most recent earnings report, the company has recorded yet another profitable quarter with $9.32 billion in revenue, a 47 percent jump from this time last year. User growth also continues to be pretty strong, with a 17 percent growth from this time last year. An average of 1.32 billion people use Facebook on a daily basis.

But Facebook is more than just the News Feed, of course. In recent months, the company has seen remarkable growth from other areas of the company. Instagram now has 700 million monthly users, its Stories feature has about 250 million monthly users and Messenger itself now has 1.2 billion monthly users. Indeed, Zuckerberg mentioned on the call that WhatsApp Status, the app's version of Snapchat Stories, now has 250 million daily users. WhatsApp itself has 1 billion daily active users too. It's clear that these other parts of Facebook will be a big driver of ad revenue going forward.

COO Sheryl Sandberg talked about how there are now 15 billion business profiles on Instagram, for example, and how a lot of those companies are now showing ads on Stories as well. CEO Mark Zuckerberg also hinted at more ad revenue coming by way of Messenger.

And that's not all -- the company is currently heavily investing in video, specifically in original content. This not only draws more people to its platform, it also promises to be another huge source of advertising revenue.

Zuckerberg also took care to address some of the hate speech issues plaguing Facebook of late. "Our new mission is to bring people together," he said on the call, adding that he wants to build meaningful communities. One way that he thinks this can be achieved is with artificial intelligence. Right now, the company relies on human moderators to warn and ban those who violate community standards, but he hopes that AI will help flag that content faster.

From making its community safer to finding ads that are more relevant to you, Zuckerberg is bullish on AI as a core foundation of the company going forward. "We look forward to how AI can improve our core services," he said.

Source:
courtesy of ENGADGET

by Nicole Lee

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