Users grew 28% year-over-year driven by increased engagement from the Opera News Hub self-publishing platform and light version of the app
Oslo – Opera (NASDAQ: OPRA), one of the world’s leading browser providers and platforms in the field of integrated AI-driven digital content, today announced that its Opera News service reached more than 200 million monthly active users (MAUs) in May, a 28 percent increase year over year.
“This is an important milestone for us and represents a strong confirmation of our growth strategy. It clearly highlights our position as one of the largest AI-driven news platforms in the world, yet there is still a tremendous untapped potential for our unique news service, with more than a billion internet users in our key markets.” said Song Lin, COO of Opera.
The accelerating user growth for Opera News is mainly driven by three important factors: the expansion of Opera News Hub beyond Nigeria to Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa and Egypt; the launch of Opera News Lite, a downsized version of the Opera News application that enables people with new ways to access the Opera News service; and Opera News becoming a critical information source during the Coronavirus outbreak across both Africa and South Asia.
Opera News is based on an AI platform which uses insights from Opera’s massive user base and relies on technologies including natural language processing, computer vision, and image understanding to process content, as well as machine learning technology to recommend personalized content to each individual user. It was launched in January 2017 as an integrated feature of Opera’s mobile browsers.
The standalone Opera News app was launched a year later becoming the first news app developed with a focus on Africa and Southeast Asia. Opera News Hub is an online editorial platform focused on empowering local content creation. It was initially launched in November 2019. Each day tens of thousands of content creators and journalists of the Opera News Hub work on and publish stories and videos that matter to their local audiences. This makes Opera News a unique platform relevant on each of the markets it is present in.