Real News - Accelerating Growth At Opera News

By Derrick Nueman, Head of Investor Relations

At Opera, news, as a business, is a great growth story that is still underappreciated and undiscovered. In fact, it turns out that globally, creating a better experience for discovering content remains enormously relevant, and far from a commodity service. Our proof?  We saw revenue growth for Opera News accelerate to 160% year-over-year in the fourth quarter.

It’s an impressive jump. In just three years, we’ve grown to over 200 million active users, which is a 29% increase from last year, with Africa representing our fastest-growing region with a 61% year-over-year increase in monthly active users.

And with our expansive user base comes an incredible opportunity for brands and partners - allowing us to monetize that audience via our ad platform.

As people continue to rely on Opera News, we expect our advertising opportunity will grow even faster as more advertisers come online, our programmatic efforts expand, and we introduce even more innovative ad inventory.

We launched Opera News with a simple intent: to make content valuable to consumers - because there is a high volume of news from an expanding amount of sources. It needed to be curated and organized, so we approached this challenge with a modern solution: AI.

Users can access Opera News through our browsers, websites, and standalone apps, and the embedded AI will personalize content for them, in turn, creating meaningful engagement because we’re making news, as a consumer-facing service, relevant.

What’s encouraging to us is not just the scale, and the growth, our news platform has achieved in a relatively compressed period of time. Our platform is giving voice to unique content thanks to making it discoverable and shareable, and we even allow users to create content through our self-publishing tool, Opera News Hub.

All of which is to say, we don’t subscribe to the adage “no news is good news”. We’ll take all the news we can get!