Reading up on the most compelling social media, tech, and brand stories is one of the joys of being the editor of Marketing Dive.
From Yahoo's latest acquisition to the success of Facebook Messenger, here are the most important stories of the week.
Despite groans, Facebook's Messenger app hits 500 million users
When Facebook announced earlier this year that it would be moving its messaging capabilities to a separate app called Messenger, users were annoyed. But it now appears that the annoyance was short-lived: The company announced this week that the app had hit 500 million monthly active users. And what was either a brilliant marketing move, or just really great timing, the news came on the heels of CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing why Facebook app users were forced to download the app in the first place. "Messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think," he said.
The success of Messenger—after outcries and giving the app a 1.5 star rating on the App Store—does raise the question: Can Facebook fail?
The DoubleClick outage was...expensive
On Wednesday, something nobody thought was possible happened. Google's DoubleClick ad server went down—and for an hour, which could have cost publishers up to $1 million, sources told Business Insider. But perhaps the most significant revelation from the outage was the power of Google's DoubleClick: The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Forbes, and Time all had ad-free sites for an hour on Wednesday.
It wasn't bad news for all ad servers, however, because publishers not using DoubleClick made 26% more money during the outage.
Can YouTube take down Spotify?
This hasn't had a great couple of weeks for Spotify. First Taylor Swift, dropping arguably the most anticipated pop album this year, pulled her entire music catalog from the streaming service. Then, after months of rumors, YouTube announced its own music service called Music Key. Launching Monday in a test version, YouTube will have access to its unparalleled collection of video and music. The site has 300 hours of video uploaded every minute, so if Music Key is able to get just a fraction of its loyalists to pay for a subscription, it will dominate the competition and likely bring subscription-based music services to the mainstream.
Finally: Instagram now lets users edit photo captions
Instagram rolled out new features Monday that included an updated Explore menu, and best of all, lets users edit photo captions. The change is welcomed by all, as it's easy to type a word or letter by accident on the mobile-only social site. But the bigger question remains: when will Instagram allow for users to switch between multiple accounts?
Yahoo snatches up BrightRoll for $640 million
In keeping with CEO Marissa Mayer's acquisition roll, Yahoo announced Tuesday it would be acquiring programmatic video platform BrightRoll for $640 million. Yahoo seems to be focused on transforming itself into a video and video advertising platform, and once the deal closes, Yahoo will be the largest video network in the US market.