Facebook is getting beaten up by a punishing news cycle – but, for its part, it’s beating the street. The stock surged more than 17% in after-hours trading on Wednesday. Revenue for the fourth quarter clocked in at $16.91 billion, a 30.4% year-over-year (YoY) increase. Nearly all of that – $16.64 billion – was thanks […]
The news feed is still a money-printing machine for core Facebook. But people aren’t sharing like they used to – Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser used Nielsen data to detect that consumption on core Facebook, including Messenger, was down 13% in September – and now Facebook is putting its faith into what it hopes will […]
The Big Story is a breezy podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. When giants move, everyone takes notice. This week on “The Big Story,” the AdExchanger team looks at some small but significant shifts in Amazon’s and […]
Just as device manufacturers want to be Apple, ecommerce shops want to be Amazon and social networks look up to Facebook, China-based WeChat is the chat application others seek to emulate. Yes, WeChat, a free app with 600 million monthly active users (100 million fewer than Facebook Messenger), enables chatting, but it’s also a platform […]
Kik’s attempt to become “the WeChat of the West” has been bolstered by a $50 million infusion from WeChat’s Chinese developer, Tencent. Kik will use the funds to focus on the US teen market, a decision company President Josh Jacobs said came from observing Chinese-based WeChat’s accomplishments courting native smartphone users. He sees parallels with […]
Messaging apps now attract just as many users as social media platforms. The combined users of Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger now outrank Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, according to recent BI Intelligence research. But marketers have struggled to tap into that audience. Emojis might be a brand’s way in. “Emojis have become for […]
That might be the look on your face when you hear that emoji are a highly promising new advertising tool. But it’s true. As Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans recently mused in a blog post: “The potential to turn messaging into a platform is the Trojan horse that drives a lot of the excitement in […]
When Canadian messaging platform Kik, which aims to become the “WeChat of the West,” hired former Accuen CEO Josh Jacobs as its president of Kik Services, many wondered why someone who had been so ingrained in advertising would pivot to messaging. Or maybe it’s not such a pivot: After all, Jacobs will supervise the new […]
