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Facebook While Facebook prepares to offer readers a way to  subscribe and pay for news  directly from inside its app, the social network continues to tinker with how it presents publishers’ content elsewhere. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook has removed Instant Articles — Facebook’s self-hosted, faster-loading article format for mobile — from Messenger. “As we continue to refine and improve Instant Articles — and in order to have the greatest impact on people and publishers — we’re focusing our investment in Instant Articles in the Facebook core app and are no longer offering Instant Articles in Messenger,” a spokesperson said. “We believe that Messenger is an exciting channel for new and interesting news consumption experiences, including the opportunity to build unique messaging experiences in Messenger that many publishers (including TechCrunch) have executed successfully via the Messenger Platform.” Instant Article...

Snap and Google will be partnered for the next five years, according to Snap’s S-1 filing released last week. Completed on January 30, the deal commits Snap to purchasing $400 million in Google's cloud services annually until 2022, totaling $2 billion over the period. The new lease is a formal continuation of a partnership that began around 2013,  TechCrunch notes .  The deal is a big win for Google Cloud, as mobile video is poised to make up a larger portion of the data storage space. Snapchat users are highly engaged, with the average daily user turning to the app 18 times each day, according to Snap's S-1. And although Google doesn’t break out revenue from its cloud business, instead lumping it together with nonadvertising, which includes the Google Play store, the $400 million deal will give it a hefty annual bump. In Q4 2016, nonadvertising accrued $3.4 billion in sales. Mobile video already accounts for more than half of all mobile traffic. In 2015,...

Facebook Back in the '90s, before memes were really a thing, it was kind of a meme to pass around pictures of Bill Gates as a Borg — the cyborg baddies of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" fame. If you're not a "Star Trek," fan, trust me, it's a sick own. Before the Borg attacked, they would issue their famous warning: "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile." It was a warning that resonated with the tech industry of the day. Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft became known as a company that would win at any cost. From productivity apps to web browsers, any competitor Microsoft couldn't simply buy it would crush by making a new, competing product and win by selling to its huge existing customer base. Now we're starting to see history repeat itself, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stepped in to the role once occupied by Gates. Consider Facebook's reaction to Snapc...

Snap Inc’s initial public offering filing seemed to show a company with a basic math problem: the company's cost of revenue for 2016 - the amount it had to spend just to keep the messaging service running - was $47 million higher than its $405 million in sales. The high cost of revenue, which in Snap's case consists mainly of payments to Alphabet Inc's Google for hosting the service, means that, on an annual basis, Snap lost money on every one of its 158 million users in 2016, even before accounting for salaries, office rents or anything else. Snap revealed in its IPO prospectus, filed with securities regulators on Thursday, that it will pay Google at least $2 billion over the next five years. But the cost side of the problem may not be as serious as it seems. The company's hosting costs are broadly in line with other social media companies. Its cost of revenue per active daily user was 97 cents in the last quarter of 2016, not much higher than the 85 cents that Face...