Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday that the changes they brought on board like the news feed algorithm tweak among other fake news purging techniques which began over a year ago may have greatly affected the time spent on the site by 50 million hours for each day, or 5 percent.
“Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day. By focusing on meaningful connections, our community and business will be stronger over the long term.”
Facebook since the last American presidential election has made efforts to combat fake news by diminishing them and even gone as far as partnering with fact checkers to validate a story.
While this reduced time spent on Facebook might not sound very well to investors, the cleaned up news feed could just mean more ads in the news feed and this should give investors something to be happy about. But it could drive up ad prices as demand falls in form of time spent on the site by the average user.
The social media company has likewise started to roll out improvements to its related post in the midst of backlash from critics that Facebook has been utilised to spread fake news, abhor discourse and other vicious substance.
On the earnings side though, Facebook reported final quarter earnings of $12.97 billion, up 47 percent. For 2017, Facebook reported earnings of $15.93 billion, or $5.39 an offer, on income of $40.65 billion. Analysts though were expecting earnings of $1.95 per share on income of $12.54 billion.
With respect to user growth, it was up 14 percent over a similar period a year ago, to 2.13 billion clients, about what was normal. The company also added 32 million daily users over the quarter, its most minimal quarter-over-quarter bounce in two years.
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Paul Femi Balo is the founder and publisher of TechBooky. He covers artificial intelligence, African technology, digital infrastructure, enterprise technology and the global digital economy.
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