Instagram expands ads to Explore feeds

Instagram said Wednesday it planned to launch advertising on its Explore page, expanding marketing opportunities on the Facebook-owned, visual-focused social network.

In the coming months, ads will appear on the Explore feed, where users go to discover content aligned with their interests, an Instagram blog post said.

“Today, 80 percent of people follow a business on Instagram, and Explore can help them find the next business or product they might love,” the Instagram business team wrote.

“Whether it’s shopping, catching up on stories or discovering the latest trends, we see people actively looking to connect with brands they like. That’s why, over the next few months, we’ll be introducing ads in Explore feed.”

The statement said the ad rollout would be done “slowly and thoughtfully” in the coming months.

“For advertisers, this is an opportunity to be part of what’s culturally relevant and trending while reaching new audiences who are looking to discover something new,” the Instagram team said.

Instagram, which now has more than a billion users worldwide and has attracted some users tired of the core Facebook platform, has become an important source of advertising revenue for the California social networking giant.

Although Facebook does not offer a detailed breakdown, the research firm eMarketer estimated that Instagram ad revenue in the US will grow nearly 47 percent this year to reach $9.08 billion.

“Instagram advertising is very popular, and Explore will open up a pipeline of valuable new ad inventory,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

“Half of Instagram users use Explore, making it a highly popular feature. We expect advertisers to quickly adopt this ad placement.”

Instagram, acquired by Facebook in 2012, began limited advertising in 2013 and two years later began serving up video ads.

Earlier this week, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri sought to quell fears that the social network uses private messages as part of its ad targeting strategy.

“We don’t look at your messages, we don’t listen in on your microphone; doing so would be super problematic for a lot of different reasons,” Mosseri said in an interview with CBS.

#Facebook and #Instagram are down for some users around the world

Facebook and Instagram appear to be partially down for some users around the world today. While you can open both platforms, it looks like you can’t send or receive messages on either platform, and you can’t post new content either.

WhatsAppappeared to be fine for many people, but users in Paraguay, India, Bangladesh, Argentina, and more note that they are experiencing issues with sending messages. DownDetector indicates that those in Brazil were experiencing the most severe outages.

We tested multiple accounts at The Verge, and found that Messenger couldn’t load at all on desktop, although the mobile app was working. Instagram was worse: posts weren’t loading, Instagram Stories were down, and direct messages and the button to post new content were also not working. Facebook’s ad section was not functioning either, and it led to an internal error when you tried to buy an ad.

About an hour after users noted the outage, Facebook responded on Twitter. It also noted that “the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.”

Facebook

✔@facebook

We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

15.5K

6:49 PM - Mar 13, 2019

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Instagram on desktop as of 1PM ET.

According to DownDetector, it looks like the outages are mainly in New England; Texas; Seattle, Washington; parts of Latin America, including Peru; the UK; India; and the Philippines. Users have written in from Canada, Las Vegas, and Turkey to note outages there as well. We’ve reached out to Facebook and Instagram to learn more.

It now looks like Oculus is also down. One user in California wrote in to The Verge, “Nobody can log in to any multiplayer games purchased through the Oculus store. They also can’t access their Oculus Home environments.” Users also reported being unable to buy games from the Oculus store.

Victor E Garcia@otiteb

 · 1h

@oculus , i am having problems managing apps on the dashboard: users in release channel that were already in are not appearing now. Are your systems having some sort of issues today?

Oculus Support

✔@OculusSupport

Hey there, we're currently looking into an issue on our end, and hope to have it resolved soon. We really appreciate your patience. Thank you!

8:16 PM - Mar 13, 2019

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Other users noted that attempting to use Facebook to sign into apps like Tinder or Spotify wasn’t working either. Attempting to do so would bring up an error saying this feature isn’t available right now. If you were already signed into Spotify, it appears that your login is still valid, but once you sign out, you’ll be unable to get back in.

via Theverge

Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg Apex to Become the World’s Third Richest Person

Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has overtaken Warren Buffett as the world’s third-richest person, further solidifying technology as the most robust creator of wealth.

Zuckerberg, who trails only Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, eclipsed Buffett Friday as Facebook shares climbed 2.4 percent, according to the
Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

It’s the first time that the three wealthiest people on the ranking made their fortunes from technology. Zuckerberg, 34, is now worth $81.6 billion, about $373 million more than Buffett, the 87-year-old chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Zuckerberg’s ascent has been driven by investors’ continued embrace of Facebook, the social-network giant that shook off the fallout from a data-privacy crisis that hammered its shares, sending them to an eight-month low of $152.22 on March 27. The stock closed Friday at a record $203.23.

Technology fortunes make up about a fifth of the more than $5 trillion in wealth tracked by the Bloomberg index, more than any other sector. The ranking, which tracks the world’s 500 richest people, is updated after the close of each trading day in New York.

Buffett, once the world’s wealthiest person, is sliding in the ranking thanks to his charitable giving, which he kicked off in earnest in 2006. He’s donated about 290 million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares to charities, most of it to Gates’s foundation. Those shares are now worth more than $50 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Zuckerberg has pledged to give away 99 percent of his Facebook stock in his lifetime.

Facebook Foubder, Mark Zuckerberg now launches IGTV to rival YouTube

Instagram has announced a new TV service IGTV that appears designed to lure young viewers away from YouTube andback in the clutches of Mark Zuckerberg.And it features one major difference from its rival:

Instagram’s video display will be designed to fill a verticalsmartphone screen, rather than horizontal displays like YouTube.The featured is called IGTV and will increaseFacebook-owned Instagram’s video time limit from one minute to 10 minutes for most users. Accounts with large audiences will be able to go on for as long as an hour. The video will be available through Instagram or a new app called IGTV.The video will eventuallygiveFacebookmore opportunities to sell advertising.

It’s the latest instance in which Instagram has ripped a page from a rival’s playbook in an effort to preserve its status as a place for young people to share and view content.In this case, Instagram is mimicking Google’s YouTube. Before, Facebook and Instagram have copied Snapchat – another magnet for teens and young adults.

Instagram, now nearly 8 years old, is moving further from its roots as a photo-sharing service as it dives headlong intoa longer-form video.The initiative comes as parent company Facebook struggles to attract teens, while also dealing with a scandal that exposed its leaky controls for protecting users’ personal information.Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1 billion six years ago, now has 1 billion users, up from 800 million ninemonths ago.

More importantly, 72 percent of U.S. kids rangingfrom 13 to 17 years old use Instagram, second to YouTube at 85 per cent, according to the Pew Research Center.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg apologise to European Parliament over data scandal

Facebook Boss Mark Zuckerberg apologies to the European Parliament on Tuesday, pledging that the social mediagiant has learned hard lessons from a massive breach of users’ personal data.

Zuckerberg’s comments, released in advance of the hearing in Brussels, are the latest part of a tour of contrition over the Cambridge Analytica scandal that began in the US Congress in April.

“Whether it’s fake news, foreign interference in elections or developers misusing people’s information, we didn’t take a broadenough view of our responsibilities,” Zuckerberg will say, according to preparedremarks e-mailed to AFP.

“That was a mistake, and I’m sorry.”The Facebook chief’s grilling by the European Parliament will be live-streamed to the public after he staged a U-turn on Monday and agreed to a webcast, in a further bid to limit the fallout from the data scandal.Angry EU lawmakers had objected to initial plans for it to be held behind closed doors.

Facebook admitted that up to 87 million users may have had their data hijacked by British consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which workedfor US President DonaldTrump during his 2016 campaign.The Silicon Valley giant has told the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, that the personal data of up to 2.7 million Europeans may have been sent inappropriately to Cambridge Analytica, which has since filed forbankruptcy in the US.

– ‘Big mistake’ – Zuckerberg will also saythat Facebook will makefresh investments to protect its users in the wake of the scandal.He will tell parliament Facebook is committed to Europe, with plans to increase from 7,000 people working in a dozen European cities to 10,000 by year-end.

“I expect this will significantly impact our profitability.But I want to be clear: keeping people safe will always be more important than maximising our profits,” he will add.Facebook also serves a valuable social role withtens of thousands of people having used its Safety Check feature “after the recent terrorist attacks in Berlin, Paris, London and here in Brussels”, Zuckerberg will say.The hearing comes three days before the EUintroduces sweeping new personal data protection rules, which the Facebook chief sayshe now welcomes.

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani on Monday calledthe decision to live-stream the questioning “great newsfor EU citizens”.In April, Tajani rejected Zuckerberg’s initial offerto send a more junior executive in his place, saying it would be a “bigmistake” for him not to answer questions from an elected body that regulates a market of 500 million people, many of them Facebook users.Tajani will meet him around 1600 GMT, followed by the hearing with parliamentary leaders half an hour later.

Tajani said MEPs want to know if “people used data for changing the position of the citizens,”including during the shock 2016 referendum for Britain to leave the EU.Objecting to the latest plans for a closed-door hearing, MEPs insisted Zuckerberg face a grilling similar to his 10-hour interrogation inUS Congress last month.Guy Verhofstadt, who heads the ALDE liberals group in parliament, dropped his plan to boycott the event now that it will be “transparent and public”.Inviting Europeans to send him questions for Zuckerberg, Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister, tweeted that EU citizens“deserve to hear the truth.”Udo Bullmann, of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, said it would have been a “farce” not to have a public event.

EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova paid Zuckerberg a backhanded compliment in recent weeks for having admitted that the Facebook scandal showed the need for strict new rules despite the reluctance of the USinternet giants.The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into effect on Friday, aims to give users morecontrol over how their personal information is stored and used online, with big fines for firms that break the rules.

Zuckerberg, who has repeatedly apologised for the massive data breach, told the US Congress in April that the more stringent EU rules could serve as a model globally.

Mark Zuckerberg Has Made $4 Billion in 2018

The new year is off to a great start for America’s billionaires. Major market indices are up 2% year-to-date, continuing the major stock gains of last year.

Among those profiting from the continued stock surge is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The 33-year-old has earned $4.16 billion since 2018 began, with company shares climbing more than 5%.

That’s been enough to vault Zuckerberg from 5th to 4th on Bloomberg‘s billionaires list (where he’s been as recently as 2016). He’s now worth nearly $77 billion.

The GOP tax bill could add billions to Amazon, Facebook and Google’s bottom lines

Amazon, Google and Facebook will save a combined $4.5 billion on taxes thank to the GOP tax bill, according to Cowen.

Cowen estimates that Amazon, Google and Facebook will save a combined $4.5 billion on taxes in 2018 thanks to the GOP tax bill.
They should also benefit from the bill's capex expensing provision.
The GOP tax bill » has long been expected to boost corporate profits. Now we know just how much the biggest tech companies in the US stand to save — and what that could mean for their bottom lines.

Google » will save $2.28 billion in 2018, while Facebook » will see $1.56 billion in savings and
Amazon » will enjoy a $723 million break, according to estimates from Cowen senior research analyst John Blackledge.

The firm forecasts those savings will translate to big earnings-per-share (EPS) boosts for each company, with Amazon the big winner, boasting an expected upside of 24%. Google and Facebook will both get an EPS bump of 8%, Cowen said.

For context, the Cowen's analysis is based on three assumptions: (1) the US corporate tax rate goes to 22% from 35% on January 1, 2018, (2) there are no changes to international taxes, and (3) there's no impact from other aspects of the tax bill.
But the good news for the mega-cap tech triumvirate doesn't end there.

Cowen sees Google, Facebook and Amazon also benefiting from the proposed capital expenditure expensing provision in the GOP tax bill. The firm estimates that the companies will spend a combined $234 billion on capex from 2018 to 2022, noting that Facebook has said it plans to double reinvestment in 2018.

So there you have it — three of the hottest tech firms in the US look poised to keep adding to their dominance, all thanks to the GOP tax bill. Bet against them at your own peril.

Business Insider

The Giant Social Network Hit 2 Billion Users - Facebook

The social media network giant Facebook says its ranks of monthly active users have hit the two billion mark -or more than a quarter of the world’s population.

“As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people!” co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his Facebook page marking the milestone.

“We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let’s bring the world closer together,” he wrote. “It’s an honor to be on this journey with you.”

Naomi Gleit, a vice president at the internet giant, credited millions of small communities at Facebook for helping drive growth.
More than a billion people take part in “groups” at Facebook each month and more than 800 million people “like” something at the social network on an average day, she added.

Founded in 2004, Facebook hit the billion-user mark five years ago.
Meanwhile, the social network announced that it deleted about 66,000 posts a week in the last two months in an effort to crack down on what it deems to be hate speech.
The company said in a blog post that deleting posts can “feel like censorship”, but that it is working on explaining its process better and improving its enforcement of hate speech.

Facebook defines hate speech as attacks on people based on their race, sexual orientation and other “protected characteristics”.
As part of that effort, Facebook says it plans to hire an additional 3,000 people in the next year to review posts. That is on top of the 4,500 people it currently has reviewing posts.