This is from Mark Zuckerberg's post. I think it's a decent explanation of their performance. Historically Facebook always made these longer-term bets and they've typically paid off.
"Before I get to that, I want to briefly touch on our Q4 results, which I know Sheryl and Dave are going to go deeper on. I'm proud of the work our teams did here. We shipped products, our community continued to grow, and businesses of all sizes turned to us to help them reach people. But there are two things that I want to call out that are having an impact on our business.
The first is competition. People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. And this is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long-term. As is our work to make sure our apps are the best services out there for young adults, which I spoke about on our last call.
The second area, and related to this, is that we're in the middle of a transition on our own services towards short-form video like Reels. So as more activity shifts towards this medium, we're replacing some time in News Feed and other higher monetizing surfaces. So as a result of both competition and this shift to short-form video as well as our focus on serving young adults over optimizing overall engagement, we're going to continue to see pressure on impression growth in the near term. Now I'm confident that leaning harder into these trends is the right short-term tradeoff to make in order to get long-term gains. We've made these types of transitions before with mobile feed and Stories, where we took on headwinds in the near-term to align with important trends over the long term. And while video has historically been slower to monetize, we believe that over time short-form video is going to monetize more like feed or Stories than like Watch – so I'm optimistic that we'll get to where we need to be with Reels too."
So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads.
Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from people I don’t know that someone I do know shared, and the rest I can’t even classify but it’s utter garbage. The only useful piece of FB was Marketplace but they managed to cram it so full of paid content and the rest is clearly online stores pretending to be local sellers that are this point I have zero use for that as well. I am sure they’ll continue to be printing money with their “generate outrage => show ads” core loop but how long will that actually last?
It's unfortunate that Reels (at least what I get in my feed) is complete garbage. Half the time I don't even know what I'm watching, it's just some mix of shock media and sexually suggestive crap. I keep trying to hide it from my feed but Facebook is intent on shoving it down my throat.
Stories "paid off"? Are there ads in them? Are they popular with other people?
Very minimally utilized in my social circle, I see maybe 1 suggested story per month, maybe click through 2-4 a year, watch 10 seconds of bland content by someone I haven't talked to in years, then close the tab wondering why I thought the it was going to be interesting this time.
> Historically Facebook always made these longer-term bets and they've typically paid off
Have they? They're better than Google. But most of Facebook's side gigs fizzled. Their last bold leap was from desktop to mobile, and that was only by averting disaster with their Instagram acquisition.
Facebook’s core business model appears to be in decline. They don’t have a very diversified revenue stream despite trying various side businesses. This is the market worried that Facebook’s best days are behind it.
Facebook is betting the farm on the metaverse stuff but without meaningful financial results that’s not going to placate market concerns over what looks like a downhill future for the core businesses. Facebook’s less than fantastic record at making money on its other businesses doesn’t have the market terribly optimistic about about the future prospects metaverse stuff either. Net net stock down 20%.
I don't get metaverse - they seem to be throwing lots of money and people at it, and hyping it up like it's the future. But from what I've seen so far they've just built VRChat, but worse. It's been done before by other people, it's not a new thing at all (Second Life released almost 20 years ago).
This isn't a project that benefits from any of Facebooks strengths - game development companies are much better positioned to make compelling social VR experiences like this.
"Metaverses" in general are a cool 80s sci-fi novel concept. But they're just video game environments with better-than-typical communication features - hyping them up with piles of marketing and betting the farm on your specific one being successful seems like an incredibly poor business move.
Exactly, and unlike, say, Google or Apple, I don't think Facebook has really ever had more than one big payoff idea. If that core business model/idea has seen most of its growth, and may even decline, then there is really not much reason to expect it to find any other way to keep growing. They are big, they are profitable, but they are not going to be growing fast in the future, and one could argue should be valued (in terms of earnings/share) more like a utility or a consumer commodity manufacturer, than a technology firm.
because the killer feature of facebook is staying in touch and meeting people. the path to monetization and revenue burned those features and overloaded them with spam and shit no one wanted. it got to the point where people stopped using facebook to meet and stay in touch with people
a similar pattern is happening on instagram although to a lesser degree
the metaverse bet is a good one to try and make something new where the value requires you to be on the fb platform. we will see if it works. i personally don’t see it going anywhere
Disagree about them "betting the farm" on metaverse. They may be throwing some advertising dollars behind it, but it is clear that the bulk of their efforts are still focused on their core apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and the competition with TikTok. I doubt the product and engineering teams are as invested in metaverse as Zuck wants the world to believe.
> Facebook’s core business model appears to be in decline.
If you mean the data mining and trading, I wouldn't believe that for a second. Sure, it can't go on so openly and monopolised like before, but there is a huge industry built on it already, each new digital service opening up opportunities for a bit of side income. Facebook was an easy target to aim at - but there's your webshop, food delivery service, electricity supplier in the line.
> Facebook is betting the farm on the metaverse stuff but without meaningful financial results that’s not going to placate market concerns over what looks like a downhill future for the core businesses.
Unless Zuck can pull a Bezos with convincing investors, Meta's stock will be in trouble for a few years until their metaverse division starts becoming profitable; which will be at least a decade if they're focused on growth.
- Earnings per share: $3.67 vs $3.84 expected
- Revenue: $33.67 billion vs $33.4 billion expected
Facebook also missed estimates with user numbers.
- Daily Active Users (DAUs): 1.93 billion vs 1.95 billion expected
- Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 2.91 billion vs 2.95 billion expected
- Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $11.57 vs $11.38 expected
Future guidance was the biggest miss.
- Q1 revenue guidance was $27 billion to $29 billion, while analysts were expecting sales of $30.15 billion
It's not really plausible that the market can predict Facebook's earnings to within 5% and that such a small miss would cause a rational investor to value Facebook 20% lower.
This seems more like a symptom of the market being generally skittish, with a small side of "expected" earnings actually being a low-biased estimate, so it's more like a 10% miss.
It's so confusing to me see headlines calling this a "huge earnings miss". Revenue was greater than expected, as was ARPU. I get that the users are under, but this seems pretty far from a huge miss, no?
Really, really curious to see how all this market volatility will affect their talent pool. Losing almost all gains over the last 18 months will certainly cause some people to reconsider their tenure — I know I have since my company's (Not FB) stock has been hammered along with everyone else in the tech growth sector.
A lot of golden handcuffs are being unshackled right now
Some of the companies whose stock price has been affected the most are making up for the loss by giving more stock. I’d expect Facebook to do the same to retain their talent if the stock drops significantly.
> Really, really curious to see how all this market volatility will affect their talent pool. Losing almost all gains over the last 18 months will certainly cause some people to reconsider their tenure
This explains the shift to Meta. The current company is basically dying, and so they are going to bet the house on something new. Apple really did a number on them by restricting the data they can collect
Facebook is dying slowly in the developed world, that is true. However it is still growing in emerging markets. And most importantly: FB is still generating tons of cash to fund the other assets.
WhatsApp has basically zero monetization right now but billions of users. Huge potential cash cow.
Instagram still has a ton of potential for further optimized monetization. Think fully embedded 1-click buying for things like fashion, gadgets, accessories. They could take a decent cut of Shopifys business if executed right.
Revenues for the quarter jumped 20 percent to $33.67 billion from $28.07 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $33.41 billion for the quarter.
> It’s a slight earnings miss. The price will rebound in the morning and it’ll be back up in a week or two.
I wrote this in another FB thread but they need to own e-commerce vertical: Stripe and Shopify. Others here mentioned opening up their data centers too.
After the 20% Drop, Meta will have a market cap of $700B. Compared to ( Using billion for comparison )
$2850B Apple
$2350B Microsoft
$1950B Alphabet
$1500B Amazon
I mean you need to be at least Trillion dollar market cap to join the club, the only other trillion dollar market cap crop is Saudi Aramco. But I think we should ignore that. May be dropping Meta from the MAMAA? Even Amazon is twice its size, and at the top Apple is Four times the size.
It is also interesting around Facebook IPO in 2011 / 2012, I actually expected Google and Facebook will destroy each other and become one. either Google winning Social or Facebook took over Search within next 10 years. That didn't happen. Google tries to enter social but have absolutely not a god damn idea what they are doing. It wasn't clear to me then at the time Google had no product mindset.
Had that happened the combined company would be the same size as Apple.
It will be interesting to see Amazon's report in a few hours time. I am wondering if they will join the 2 Trillion dollar club soon.
It is very common for stocks to significantly rise or fall after the release of earnings reports. If stocks always went up after their earnings report, it would make sense to buy the stock beforehand and sell immediately afterwards. Conversely, if the stock always went down after earnings, it would make sense to sell the stock right before the report was released and rebuy afterwards.
I noticed that often times these dips lead to sensationalist headlines like "Apple shares tank 5% after abysmal earnings". When I looked into these headlines, I often noticed that the stock often "plummeted" to the price it was at a week or two prior.
To counter this, one metric I use is, "When was the last time the stock was at this new price?"
Today Facebook shares are trading at ~$238. The last time it was trading at this price was June 2020.
Apple vs ad-tech is a really interesting battle. It shows the immense power Apple has in the consumer market today, where they can affect some of the largest businesses in the US unilaterally. Meta is in a very tricky position in that unless they put up an actual paywall users don’t really have any incentive to allow tracking. But putting up a paywall introduces a lot of friction, not to mention the adverse selection (the affluent people you most want to advertise to are probably the most likely to pay to not be tracked).
I know most people on here really dislike targeted advertising. I’m not going to speculate on the potential future problems that tracking could lead to, and I think it’s very reasonable to be concerned. But so far targeted advertisement has been a net positive for me. I’ve gotten to use some really good applications for free, and I’ve gotten ads that are actually relevant.
1. The CEOs insistence on "Competition" as the cause for the increased focus on short term impression rates seems pointed at regulators and Congress rather than at investors. This is silly too, Google had no such pressure on impressions and performed rather well just days before.
2. The cat is out of the bag. Facebooks secret sauce was their very HEAVY focus on bottom funnel advertising where they would ascribe suspect numbers that were not Industry standard to "Conversion" objectives (RoAS anyone?). Anyone, anywhere sees an ad at any point in their conversion journey and Facebook would assign a large weighted portion of conversions leading from that individual in their reporting.
3. The big scary underlined headline here should be HOW POWERFUL APPLE IS. They sneeze and change one small thing in the way apps can access their platforms and we see an entire industry shaken.
4. They won't die out quick. These numbers, though not "Growing" as fast as befor or expected to grow as fast (which is the bigger concern), still is much, much , much higher than they need to sustain their business over the next two decades. The big risk though, is the stock price drop which is how the bulk of their pricy talent is paid dropping. Everyone there is currently staring at a 25% pay cut on their stock based comp and that is not a pretty picture for attracting the best kids graduating this year with ambitions of joining a fast growing tech firm or pulling in talent from places like MSFT or GOOG or AAPL who will not want to jump aboard a perceived sinking ship.
They can change their name all they want, they are slowing turning into the AOL of our decade. I'm willing to take bets on where this is all going.
I own an Oculus - it sucks. The founder of Oculus admits it sucks. Instagram sucks more than it did last year. I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole.
Eventually FB will lose because their entire business model is based on outrage, and that cant last forever. It's very clear it is having catastrophic consequences for societies everywhere.
Meta is the most owned stock (2% of all invested) by institutional and superinvestors with an hold medium price of 339$ (source DATAROMA https://www.dataroma.com/m/stock.php?sym=fb). This crash would not be painless for the whole market.
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Facebook loses users for the first time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30186326 - Feb 2022 (395 comments)
[+] [-] omot|4 years ago|reply
"Before I get to that, I want to briefly touch on our Q4 results, which I know Sheryl and Dave are going to go deeper on. I'm proud of the work our teams did here. We shipped products, our community continued to grow, and businesses of all sizes turned to us to help them reach people. But there are two things that I want to call out that are having an impact on our business.
The first is competition. People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. And this is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long-term. As is our work to make sure our apps are the best services out there for young adults, which I spoke about on our last call.
The second area, and related to this, is that we're in the middle of a transition on our own services towards short-form video like Reels. So as more activity shifts towards this medium, we're replacing some time in News Feed and other higher monetizing surfaces. So as a result of both competition and this shift to short-form video as well as our focus on serving young adults over optimizing overall engagement, we're going to continue to see pressure on impression growth in the near term. Now I'm confident that leaning harder into these trends is the right short-term tradeoff to make in order to get long-term gains. We've made these types of transitions before with mobile feed and Stories, where we took on headwinds in the near-term to align with important trends over the long term. And while video has historically been slower to monetize, we believe that over time short-form video is going to monetize more like feed or Stories than like Watch – so I'm optimistic that we'll get to where we need to be with Reels too."
[+] [-] IgorPartola|4 years ago|reply
Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from people I don’t know that someone I do know shared, and the rest I can’t even classify but it’s utter garbage. The only useful piece of FB was Marketplace but they managed to cram it so full of paid content and the rest is clearly online stores pretending to be local sellers that are this point I have zero use for that as well. I am sure they’ll continue to be printing money with their “generate outrage => show ads” core loop but how long will that actually last?
[+] [-] Aperocky|4 years ago|reply
"We're getting beat by Tiktok and we're going to catch up by being more like tiktok"
That doesn't exactly exude confidence.
[+] [-] stephenboyd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ozzie_osman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwkoss|4 years ago|reply
Very minimally utilized in my social circle, I see maybe 1 suggested story per month, maybe click through 2-4 a year, watch 10 seconds of bland content by someone I haven't talked to in years, then close the tab wondering why I thought the it was going to be interesting this time.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
Have they? They're better than Google. But most of Facebook's side gigs fizzled. Their last bold leap was from desktop to mobile, and that was only by averting disaster with their Instagram acquisition.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pier25|4 years ago|reply
Maybe they thought it was going to fail like Vine and other short video platforms.
[+] [-] whiplash451|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg_1234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smrtinsert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JCM9|4 years ago|reply
Facebook is betting the farm on the metaverse stuff but without meaningful financial results that’s not going to placate market concerns over what looks like a downhill future for the core businesses. Facebook’s less than fantastic record at making money on its other businesses doesn’t have the market terribly optimistic about about the future prospects metaverse stuff either. Net net stock down 20%.
[+] [-] p1necone|4 years ago|reply
This isn't a project that benefits from any of Facebooks strengths - game development companies are much better positioned to make compelling social VR experiences like this.
"Metaverses" in general are a cool 80s sci-fi novel concept. But they're just video game environments with better-than-typical communication features - hyping them up with piles of marketing and betting the farm on your specific one being successful seems like an incredibly poor business move.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foolfoolz|4 years ago|reply
a similar pattern is happening on instagram although to a lesser degree
the metaverse bet is a good one to try and make something new where the value requires you to be on the fb platform. we will see if it works. i personally don’t see it going anywhere
[+] [-] mjfl|4 years ago|reply
and it's an odd bet.
[+] [-] fleddr|4 years ago|reply
How so? Revenue is up and there's more users. What decline are you referring to?
People have expressed Facebook being passe or not cool for a decade now. They keep growing anyway.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poisonborz|4 years ago|reply
If you mean the data mining and trading, I wouldn't believe that for a second. Sure, it can't go on so openly and monopolised like before, but there is a huge industry built on it already, each new digital service opening up opportunities for a bit of side income. Facebook was an easy target to aim at - but there's your webshop, food delivery service, electricity supplier in the line.
[+] [-] chaostheory|4 years ago|reply
Unless Zuck can pull a Bezos with convincing investors, Meta's stock will be in trouble for a few years until their metaverse division starts becoming profitable; which will be at least a decade if they're focused on growth.
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
Google and Microsoft have had the same business model forever .
[+] [-] gzer0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmurray|4 years ago|reply
This seems more like a symptom of the market being generally skittish, with a small side of "expected" earnings actually being a low-biased estimate, so it's more like a 10% miss.
[+] [-] distrill|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vishnugupta|4 years ago|reply
Despite having just about every living human as their customer they are expected to grow.
[+] [-] ProfessorLayton|4 years ago|reply
A lot of golden handcuffs are being unshackled right now
[+] [-] asd88|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markvdb|4 years ago|reply
One can hope...
[+] [-] intrepidsoldier|4 years ago|reply
They might want to become a cloud infrastructure provider for some side money and buy themselves some time to figure out this Metaverse fantasy :)
Hey, AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.
[+] [-] fdgsdfogijq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingkev|4 years ago|reply
WhatsApp has basically zero monetization right now but billions of users. Huge potential cash cow.
Instagram still has a ton of potential for further optimized monetization. Think fully embedded 1-click buying for things like fashion, gadgets, accessories. They could take a decent cut of Shopifys business if executed right.
[+] [-] teeray|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pigalowda|4 years ago|reply
> It’s a slight earnings miss. The price will rebound in the morning and it’ll be back up in a week or two.
[+] [-] gigatexal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omot|4 years ago|reply
Never underestimate the blue message bubble y'all. That's real leverage.
[+] [-] ppsreejith|4 years ago|reply
Dupe 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30184560
[+] [-] lvl100|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
$2850B Apple $2350B Microsoft $1950B Alphabet $1500B Amazon
I mean you need to be at least Trillion dollar market cap to join the club, the only other trillion dollar market cap crop is Saudi Aramco. But I think we should ignore that. May be dropping Meta from the MAMAA? Even Amazon is twice its size, and at the top Apple is Four times the size.
It is also interesting around Facebook IPO in 2011 / 2012, I actually expected Google and Facebook will destroy each other and become one. either Google winning Social or Facebook took over Search within next 10 years. That didn't happen. Google tries to enter social but have absolutely not a god damn idea what they are doing. It wasn't clear to me then at the time Google had no product mindset.
Had that happened the combined company would be the same size as Apple.
It will be interesting to see Amazon's report in a few hours time. I am wondering if they will join the 2 Trillion dollar club soon.
[+] [-] redwood|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhelkey|4 years ago|reply
I noticed that often times these dips lead to sensationalist headlines like "Apple shares tank 5% after abysmal earnings". When I looked into these headlines, I often noticed that the stock often "plummeted" to the price it was at a week or two prior.
To counter this, one metric I use is, "When was the last time the stock was at this new price?"
Today Facebook shares are trading at ~$238. The last time it was trading at this price was June 2020.
[+] [-] dralley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] librish|4 years ago|reply
I know most people on here really dislike targeted advertising. I’m not going to speculate on the potential future problems that tracking could lead to, and I think it’s very reasonable to be concerned. But so far targeted advertisement has been a net positive for me. I’ve gotten to use some really good applications for free, and I’ve gotten ads that are actually relevant.
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
the stock had gone up so much since then that expectations had gotten too high.
FB/Meta still makes a crapload of money, just not as much as some analysts had expected.
[+] [-] DisjointedHunt|4 years ago|reply
1. The CEOs insistence on "Competition" as the cause for the increased focus on short term impression rates seems pointed at regulators and Congress rather than at investors. This is silly too, Google had no such pressure on impressions and performed rather well just days before.
2. The cat is out of the bag. Facebooks secret sauce was their very HEAVY focus on bottom funnel advertising where they would ascribe suspect numbers that were not Industry standard to "Conversion" objectives (RoAS anyone?). Anyone, anywhere sees an ad at any point in their conversion journey and Facebook would assign a large weighted portion of conversions leading from that individual in their reporting.
3. The big scary underlined headline here should be HOW POWERFUL APPLE IS. They sneeze and change one small thing in the way apps can access their platforms and we see an entire industry shaken.
4. They won't die out quick. These numbers, though not "Growing" as fast as befor or expected to grow as fast (which is the bigger concern), still is much, much , much higher than they need to sustain their business over the next two decades. The big risk though, is the stock price drop which is how the bulk of their pricy talent is paid dropping. Everyone there is currently staring at a 25% pay cut on their stock based comp and that is not a pretty picture for attracting the best kids graduating this year with ambitions of joining a fast growing tech firm or pulling in talent from places like MSFT or GOOG or AAPL who will not want to jump aboard a perceived sinking ship.
[+] [-] misiti3780|4 years ago|reply
They can change their name all they want, they are slowing turning into the AOL of our decade. I'm willing to take bets on where this is all going.
I own an Oculus - it sucks. The founder of Oculus admits it sucks. Instagram sucks more than it did last year. I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole.
Eventually FB will lose because their entire business model is based on outrage, and that cant last forever. It's very clear it is having catastrophic consequences for societies everywhere.
What is the saying .. ?
"The chickens will eventually came home to roost"
[+] [-] fbn79|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] advisedwang|4 years ago|reply