Facebook is preparing to launch a new standalone news app called Notify next week, according to the Financial Times reported.
The app will feature content from dozens of media partners including Vogue, the Washington Post and CBS, the newspaper said.
Facebook had earlier tied up with nine news publishers to launch "Instant Articles", which publishes their content directly to the social network's mobile news feeds. The company's new app will compete with Twitter Inc's recently launched service called Moments, which aims to provide a better way of curating and aggregating content for users and help them follow live events. Facebook was not immediately available to comment.
Social network reaches higher
Meanwhile Facebook posted surprisingly strong profit and revenue growth on Wednesday as the world’s largest social network grew even larger, with a spike in mobile users and advertising that lifted its stock to an all-time high. The company reported audience numbers that suggest it is poised to take on mainstream media as an advertising force, helping investors to overlook Facebook’s huge spending on hiring and building data centers.
Facebook now has 8 billion video views per day from 500 million people, compared with 4 billion views in April.
And Facebook's website and Instagram photo-sharing app, which opened up its platform to all advertisers in the third quarter, account for more than 1 in 5 minutes spent on mobile devices in the United States, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said. "In the medium to long run, we believe that we're not competing between Facebook and Instagram. We're competing with other forms of media," Sandberg told analysts on a conference call after the earnings report.
Facebook had 1.55 billion monthly active users as of Sept. 30, up 14 per cent from a year earlier. Of these, 1.39 billion used the service on mobile devices. “Growth is happening across the board and we’re of course looking for a lot of growth in the future in emerging markets,” Sandberg said in an interview. “We’re also pretty focused on helping bring the next set of people who are not online, online.”
Market research firm FactSet StreetAccount had predicted 1.53 billion monthly active users, with 1.36 billion on mobile. Ad revenue grew 45.4 percent to $4.30 billion, with 78 percent of that coming from mobile versus 66 percent in the year-ago quarter. “Part of the upside came from Instagram. The Instagram monetisation engine has been turned on really rapidly for the coming quarters and years,” said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst with SterneAgee.
Facebook did not disclose Instagram’s ad sales figures. But the app is expected to bring in $595 million in mobile ad revenues this year, research firm eMarketer said. Its ad revenue is projected to grow to $2.8 billion by 2017.
Facebook’s huge $3.0 billion spending, up 68 per cent from the third quarter last year, did not seem to worry investors or analysts. “I think the investors would like the company to continue to invest given that the opportunity is pretty large,” said Shyam Patil of Susquehanna Financial Group.
The stock rose about 5 per cent to an all-time high of $109.34 in extended trading, before paring gains to about 4 per cent. It closed earlier at $103.94. Total revenue jumped to $4.50 billion in the third quarter, from $3.20 billion a year earlier.
Reuters
