Meta Platforms announced that beginning next week it will roll out advertisements on its Threads app to all users worldwide, expanding a feature first tested in six pilot markets. Since its July 2023 debut, Threads has amassed over 400 million monthly active users and now exceeds its primary competitor on daily mobile user counts. Meta’s global ad integration is designed to leverage Threads’ rapidly growing engagement—average time spent per user increased by 25 percent in the fourth quarter—to drive incremental digital ad revenues across its family of apps.

In a January 22 research note, Jefferies raised its one-year price objective on Meta by 44 percent, citing resilient advertising demand and improving monetization on Reels and Stories. The firm highlighted Meta’s year-over-year revenue growth of 26 percent in the third quarter and pointed to a 3.6 percent increase in the stock’s value over the past 12 months, despite broad market underperformance. Jefferies also commended Meta’s decision to reallocate capital from underperforming Reality Labs projects, noting that this strategic budget adjustment signals management confidence in near-term cash‐flow generation.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Nicola Mendelsohn, Meta’s head of global business, criticized the European Union’s emerging regulatory framework for artificial intelligence, describing it as a significant barrier to product rollout. She warned that compliance requirements—ranging from mandatory risk assessments to strict data-handling protocols—have delayed internal pilot launches by several months and increased development costs by an estimated 15 percent. Mendelsohn emphasized that while Meta supports responsible AI standards, overly prescriptive rules risk stifling innovation and disadvantaging European users.

Meta’s newly formed Superintelligence Labs team has completed and deployed its initial suite of in-house AI models for internal testing, according to CTO Andrew Bosworth. After six months of development, the group delivered two foundational models—codenamed Avocado for text generation and Mango for image and video processing—which have demonstrated performance on par with leading open-source benchmarks. Meta plans to integrate these models into its recommendation systems and advertising ranking algorithms by mid-year, aiming to boost ad targeting efficiency and user engagement metrics.