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Facebook Sets Its Sights On Your 'Private Content'

This article is more than 9 years old.

The first quarter of 2014 was a big one for Facebook, in more ways than one.

It bought the messenging service WhatsApp for $19 billion. It spent another $2 billion to buy Oculus VR, the maker of virtual-reality headsets. The long-awaited introduction of video ads to users' Newsfeeds finally happened. It launched Paper, a mobile news-reading app. It bought a drone company called Ascenta.

It also made quite a lot of money. Facebook's financial results for the first quarter handily beat Wall Street expectations. The company reported $2.5 billion in revenues and net income of $642 million. Mobile accounted for 59% of ad revenue, up from 53% in the previous quarter.

On an earnings call with analysts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had some impressive non-financial numbers to tout as well. Facebook now has 1.28 billion monthly users, 63% of whom are active daily. That's not counting Instagram, which now has 200 million users, or WhatsApp, which just crossed the half-billion threshold. (Zuckerberg also said that Facebook's CFO, David Ebersman, is leaving the company to return to the healthcare sector.)

So Facebook has some nice momentum -- and it wants to channel that momentum into grabbing a bigger share of its users' personal conversations.

Zuckerberg calls those conversations "private content," to distinguish them from the sorts of posts that populate social networks like Facebook and Instagram. He calls private content "an ecosytem that's growing incredibly quickly," citing the rise of WhatsApp and the growth of Messenger, the in-house chat app. With 200 million monthly users (another fact revealed on the call), it's now the size of Instagram, helping explain Facebook's decision to remove chat functionality from the main iOS app and force users who want to have it to download Messenger.

Facebook's "private content" ambitions also explain why it was willing to pay $3 billion in cash to acquire Snapchat, and why it added a direct messenging function to Instagram in December.

People want to share all kinds of different content with all kinds of different audiences," Zuckerberg said. "At the intersection of each type of content and each audience, we think there’s a really compeling experience to be built."

Even if Facebook's users might not think of their private chats as "content."