Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results

[threeseed]

Threads has also now rapidly grown to 150m MAU with higher DAU than X.

It's an incredible achievement to bootstrap a social network to the leader in its category in less than a year. And it demonstrates the power of Facebook and Instagram in being able to drive traffic.

It must be comforting for Meta to know that if they wanted to build a leading TikTok competitor or any other social network in the future they can easily do it.

[acchow]

> It must be comforting for Meta to know that if they wanted to build a leading TikTok competitor or any other social network in the future they can easily do it.

They already did. It's called Reels.

[mhh__]

The scaling aspect is indeed impressive but I have not seen anyone (exactly zero) that I want to follow on threads.

I want smart people and weird but interesting schizos, not my "friends" from Instagram and Facebook. I mostly like those friends but I know their opinions on most things already for example.

Also unless one is being particularly pedantic he already has the only tiktok competitor (Instagram reels).

[wkat4242]

Seriousy? They have higher daily active users than X??

I'm really surprised to hear that. I don't really use either but wow.

Of course Meta is doing everything to make Threads work, and Elon is doing everything to burn X to the ground, there's that :P But yes it is impressive.

[eggdaft]

Can we verify this independently?

I don’t know why people trust stats from any social media company without independent verification. Stats can be massaged and there are large incentives to do it.

We know that the former Twitter board certainly did this, for example.

[tantalor]

It's the same social network on a different .com

[HDThoreaun]

Results look good to me, EPS about double yoy, reality labs still losing billions. Stock down 12% after hours though so I must be missing something I guess

[matsemann]

It's so weird to me. My Facebook feed is dead, no one posts anymore. The last weeks they spam me with notifications about nothing to get me back in and creating fake engagement. "Peter you added as a friend in high school but have never spoken to since or ever interacted with on the platform commented on a meme page, check it out".

[nextworddev]

guidance not that great, also crowded trade

[icedchai]

It seems like an overreaction to me.

[jsheard]

Oof, another $4 billion in the hole for Reality Labs. I really want VR to succeed but seeing the biggest player by far still struggling to find any path to profitability (or even breaking even) after iterating on it for a decade makes it hard to be optimistic.

[ApolloFortyNine]

The fact that they spend more than everyone else does in the space combined just blows my mind. Their Horizon worlds is literally just a worst VR chat which was developed for <$100 million. Their os frontent for the quest is great, but how many devs can you even realistically have having an impact.

And that $4 billion is just per quarter. I honestly would love to see a full breakdown. Nintendo's entire revenue is 12 billion, which is less than Meta VR spends alone, and that includes everything Nintendo does, including developing games. How has Meta spent so much and has so little to show for it?

[harles]

I’m not sure it’s a good business strategy, but I am glad to see ad money fueling more interesting tech than more profitable ads.

[tinyhouse]

Well, there's still no killer app. The productivity use case is a gimmick. Apple vision pro is also not selling well. The big promise is entertainment but it's not there yet.

[xyst]

I don’t see VR becoming mainstream. At least today anyways. It’s very niche. Hardware is clunky. The software is locked to Apple or Meta APIs. It’s difficult to explore when the manufacturers put up so many walls within their walled up ecosystems.

[JKCalhoun]

Maybe when they hit a $Trillion and VR still fails we can finally put a nail in this coffin.

[blackeyeblitzar]

It is possible that now is the right time to keep investing in it. They already have huge sunk costs, but a lot has changed since they began. LLMs became a thing. Display tech has continued to evolve quickly. There is more information on the market after seeing how products from Sony, Apple, and others have done. Meta also recently announced their new OS and their more-open platform strategy. Mobile processors are also evolving quickly. All of these things can open up possibilities - and even if it isn’t a sure thing, maybe it is worth placing a bet?

[nextworddev]

Met some business dev people at Reality Labs and they themselves don’t exactly what they are selling. Which is very worrying.

[wkat4242]

They just do it wrong.

If you see how poor Horizons is compared to something like VRChat that operates on a shoestring budget compare to meta's. Or something like viverse.

Their hardware is OK, but not groundbreaking. Their metaverse platform is really poor compared to the competition, although what they do have over the others is the ability to create in-world instead of in Unity. But really that doesn't stop creators. The environments in VRChat are much more compelling. I think part of this is Meta's way too strict moderation and content policy. Because really for adults a rubber-tile child playground is really just no fun. We need a bit of gritty.

So yeah really they're doing it wrong. I don't know how they do it exactly but clearly all that money goes to the wrong places.

I don't think this means VR is a bad idea. It can work, just not the way Meta thinks it can.

[rvz]

> "But seeing the biggest player by far still struggling to find any path to profitability"

I would have agreed if Reality Labs was its own startup but they are supported by Meta. With that said, $12BN profit in one quarter for Meta is somehow "struggling"?

Wait until you see the wave of unprofitable AI startups and companies raising capital forever without a path to profitability in sight.

Meta can afford to spend billions into Reality Labs, until that unit itself becomes profitable. They are totally fine and it is still business as usual and they will be sitting comfortably for another decade.

The rest of the so-called AI startups taking in VC capital on the other hand...

[willmadden]

"The hardware isn't ready yet."

[MarketingJason]

Why the drastically lower effective tax rate? I don't see an increase in operating expenses enough to make that big of an impact and I'd expect the increased income to raise it.

[sf_rob]

Conjecture, but did the prior report have a one time tax hit? That's fairly common.

[htrp]

Is reality labs where they're hiding all the infra spend for meta AI?

[testfoobar]

As a shareholder, I was hoping this was finally the quarter where Zuckerberg gave up on the Metaverse... Its just a giant money pit.

[blackeyeblitzar]

Down 13% after hours because of guidance: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meta-q1-earnings-135049624.ht...

[jxyxfinite]

Yet tsla is up 12%.

Someone make it make sense

[baal80spam]

Looks like something didn't quite work out this quarter: https://i.imgur.com/r80sPwT.jpeg

[TheAceOfHearts]

I found this from the Business Insider article:

> Facebook daily active users estimate: 2.11 billion

> Facebook monthly active users estimate: 3.08 billion

> Average Family service users per day estimate: 3.16 billion

> Average Family service users per month estimate: 3.97 billion

If I'm parsing this correctly, they have around 3.16 billion DAU across all services. That's an insane number of people.

Which really makes me wonder why their social media platforms suck so much. I recently re-opened Facebook and it was a desert wasteland with a handful of people I knew years ago sharing memes. Instagram has a few more users than Facebook, but aside from catching the occasional story update from a couple people, I mostly use it to follow artist accounts. And nobody that I know is participating on Threads at all.

It seems really difficult to find anything interesting on their platforms. On Facebook I looked up groups for some of my interests, and they're either completely dead or being kept alive by occasional posts of creators sharing their latest releases.

So what are these 3 billion people even doing on Meta's platforms?

[gu746]

There is a book called Sub Prime Attention Crisis which claims all these metrics are bogus. Written by an Ex Googler.

Total available attention is finite. Yet content keeps exploding. There is only one conclusion.

[VHRanger]

Messenger, whatsapp, instagram.

Also, there's a lot more people using FB than you think. Most people over the age of 50 are on FB, not IG/reddit/Tiktok

[rfrec0n]

When Facebook says "users" in claims like these, what they actually mean are accounts. This statistic includes all the multi accounts, fake accounts, spam accounts, and bot accounts. They have been getting sued over the past several years for charging advertisers when a bot or fake account engages with the advertised content.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/meta-platforms-must-face-adver...

[yodsanklai]

Don't think you're representative of the rest of the world.

[loeg]

The same guidelines:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate.

[eclectic29]

Why are Meta quarterly results so special that they always enjoy the front page of HN?

[whyenot]

For the same reason Google's and Apple's results also reach the front page. HN users upvote the posts. Maybe it's because Meta is one of the largest tech companies in the world and for many people their results are interesting news.

[whywhywhydude]

Because it’s one of the biggest tech companies and its results foreshadow earnings for other tech companies. Just look at the after hours price movements of most of the tech stocks.

[neverokay]

It’s a trillion dollar company dude. Many people laughed at their 1B ipo valuation.

Basically, never ignore these things.

[hipadev23]

FAANG (or whatever the acronym is this week) quarterly results always make front page.

[loeg]

It's the 6th biggest company in the US.