Opera has announced today that the number of monthly active users (MAUs) of its newsreader service has exceeded 100 million as of November 2017.
The firm also announced it has developed its own artificial intelligence (AI) engine to provide users with relevant content in a smart way. The AI system studies users’ news-reading behavior in real time and learns from it in order to provide them with a personalised news offer.
The news and video service has witnessed a 50-fold growth since its introduction in the Opera Mini browser in January 2017. Usage data from November shows that the average user now spends 40 minutes every day inside the Opera browser and engages with between 65 and 81 news stories per day.
This is also good news for publishers: Opera’s AI technology increases exposure of their articles by delivering them to the relevant people who are thus more likely to comment and share. In 2017, Opera has partnered with over 800 websites and publishers.
“People using their mobile phones want to consume content in a faster and easier way,” continues Peter Wallman, SVP Mobile browsers. “The AI engine is designed to instantly provide personalised and localised content, right at their fingertips. We are thrilled to see such rapid growth both in terms of users and actual usage of the service.”
The browser is a great access point for exploring news and video content from the internet. It’s also an app used for everyday life activities such as online shopping, looking up information or mobile payments. Because of this, Opera is planning to soon launch Opera Today, a dedicated news and content app, offering users news and videos relevant to them. Opera Today will use the same AI-engine Opera browsers.
“By first introducing the AI news reader into the popular Opera mobile browsers, used by 250 million people worldwide, we have managed to overcome one of the biggest challenges in making an AI newsreader truly smart, namely that of scale.” said Peter Wallman. “Building on the success of Opera Mini, we will continue developing our AI-service to make it one of the leading content discovery platforms in the world. The unique combination of a large user base with our deep technology skills gives Opera a unique position to achieve this goal. We are looking forward to releasing Opera Today in the near future.”
To experience the AI-powered newsreader on Opera Mini and Opera for Android browser, you can download the browser here.
