Facebook is testing a lot more ads in a lot more places

Three months ago, Facebook delivered some somber news to investors: The company’s revenue growth, which routinely surpassed analysts’ lofty expectations, was expected to slow “meaningfully” in the near future.

The problem, Facebook said at the time, is that the company is running out of places to stuff ads inside News Feed, its core moneymaker.

So Facebook started looking elsewhere, and when the company announces its Q4 and full-year earnings to investors Wednesday afternoon, you can bet you’ll hear about all of the tests Facebook is running to keep growth steady.

In just the past month, Facebook announced a number of new ad formats and locations it has started to test or plans to test. Here’s a list:

• Mid-roll video ads during videos that are at least 20 seconds long.
• Ads inside Instagram’s new stories feature — the same kinds of vertical video ads Snapchat also sells.
• Ads inside Facebook Messenger, its standalone messaging app.
• Branded Facebook selfie masks — again, the same kind of branded selfie ads that Snapchat sells.

The mid-roll video ads seem to be the biggest opportunity here given Facebook’s stockpile of video content and its hope for more high-quality, TV-style videos. Facebook has been after TV ad budgets for years, and mid-roll video ads may be the company’s best chance to capture them.

That doesn’t mean Facebook will say all of that Wednesday — it has never been very open about its TV aspirations — but it does seem likely that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg will want to reassure investors that Facebook has options outside of News Feed when it comes to revenue growth.

Given the growth expectations, analysts expect Facebook to deliver profits of $1.31 per share on revenue of $8.51 billion. That’s almost 46 percent growth over the same quarter last year; in Q3, Facebook growth was 55 percent year over year.

Facebook reports earnings after market close on Wednesday.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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