Technology, Revenue | featured news

AOL has been the sad sack of online media for so long now that it almost makes Yahoo look good. But at least the latest quarter showed the first year-over-year revenue growth in eight years–eight!–so it’s worth looking a little more closely at whether CEO Tim Armstrong has a handle on what can bring the Internet pioneer back from irrelevance.

Zynga reports a sharp drop in its losses in the last three months of 2012, as revenues at the designer of games including Farmville stabilised.

EBay Inc reported holiday quarter results that just beat Wall Street expectations, but the e-commerce company also gave a cautious forecast for 2013. EBay shares climbed 1.7 percent to $53.80 in after-hours trading following the announcement. Expectations were high ahead of the results because sales data from outside sources suggested strong sales growth from eBay's online marketplace and a solid increase in transactions processed by the company's PayPal payments business.

Facebook says it is testing a service that will charge users $1 to guarantee that messages they send to people they are not connected to arrive in users' inboxes, rather than in an often-ignored folder called "other."

Hulu, the privately held Internet streaming TV service, will generate about $695 million in revenue in 2012 and finish the year with more than 3 million paying subscribers, the company's CEO said on Monday.

Hewlett-Packard Co's shares plunged to a nine-year low on Wednesday after Chief Executive Meg Whitman warned of an unexpectedly steep earnings slide in 2013, with revenue set to fall in every business division except software.

Facebook is rolling out a feature that will let users give presents from their network profiles, marking the company’s first big step into offering physical goods. The new service goes way beyond the network’s old gift feature, which let you send virtual puppies and hearts. It’s more of a riff on the company’s ill-fated Deals service — which the company shuttered after four months — but with a twist.

Facebook Inc said it will start charging businesses to run Offers on its social network, turning a previously free service into a potential revenue generator at a time when Wall Street is demanding new sources of growth and profit from the company

Facebook’s results illustrated a reality for social media: It’s a soft sell medium in which advertising may not be that interesting or relevant to consumers. This is important because it means the revenue potential for social media companies such as Facebook may not be as high as many people assumed.

Foursquare is rolling out its first revenue product as the company moves from focusing on user growth to generating cash. The new Promoted Updates enables businesses to send promoted content to users. These updates will appear at the top in a prominent position in the “Explore” tab in Foursquare. That’s the section of the app that is for users to find businesses nearby. The Promoted Updates, like Google search ads, there is “intent” there while users are looking for a restaurant, bar or other business nearby, says Steven Rosenblatt, Foursquare’s chief revenue officer. Businesses pay on a “cost per action” performance basis for these ads. In some ways these updates are also like Twitter’s promoted Tweets.