Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]
investor.fb.com
investor.fb.com
The best way to predict the effect of any social media campaign against a person or organization is to evaluate the steadfastness of the campaign's target.
If you are the target of an internet mob and you blink, you're not only going to enact mob-demanded changes that are detrimental to your interests, but also broadcast weakness and attract further mob attacks.
If you instead stand your ground and refuse to be cowed by hashtag campaigns, the outrage mob eventually gets bored and finds another target. Your interests are preserved and you end up broadcasting strength and determination.
A lot of people are starting to figure out that internet mobs have no real teeth.
The classic example is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which had calls for boycotts prior to its release. Guess what those same people bought and played when the game released?
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/973/082/6e0...
We'll need to exactly define and agree what it is to be achieve tho. In my view, I think the point has been made and have been heard successfully and have caused the desired punch in the face.
Honestly, people probably don't give enough credit to the MW2 "boycott"; it showed kids that they could organize if the company's practices got out of hand. I think the MW2 and BF2 issues were really part of a longer trend towards dark patterns in video games, and it took time for people in positions of authority to realize how serious the situation could become if they continued down the path they were on.
But I work adjacent to some video game industry business strategy folks... and I can say that the various EA/microtransaction/season pass/pay2win boycotts haven't convinced anyone that those are the wrong way to go.
People in the industry are generally convinced that the golden goose is getting people to pay more than full price and now there are just footnote conversations about "can we get away this"
People in the industry needs get people to pay more than full price whether they like it or not.
http://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-uber-takedown...
Regardless of what you think of Uber, Travis Kalanick started a very large company, and Uber is as entrenched as ever.
So perhaps this actually is evidence in favor of the parent comment. Did Uber really suffer much at all? Or did they just reshuffle management, pay Kalanick billions to (kind of) leave, and continued business as usual?
Citations? I haven't really heard about them pulling any shenanigans under the new CEO's watch.
1. Happened a lot over the early do or die periods of entering new markets. 2. Continued over a much longer period of time than Travis has been gone. 3. Happened while the company was being considered a darling and was not being critically scrutinized over every move it made.
Shenanigans are truly shenanigans only once the outside world gets to know about it. Paradox of sorts really.
Continuing business as usual in the context of the parent's comment though is less about shenanigans and more about the operating model probably. Drivers are still being duped. Earth scorching ride subsidization tactics are still very much in play. Although the CEO is gone and there may be some activity happening within the company to undo toxic cultures, the overall business has not truly changed. And the overall business really ought to change.
Take for instance the case in michigan, where the Uber driver had a psychotic episode, and killed the people that were hiring him, over multiple rides over multiple hours, simply because he was the nearest driver. Uber had no infrastructure to locate a driver, or assist law enforcement in any meaningful, real time manner. Imagine if that happened in 2018, and the lack of critical infrastructure was laid that bare by a multi billion dollar tech company testing out it's latest business tweak.
In some ways, it's not much different from an organized crime structure. The main reason organized crime is able to get away with all of their crime for long enough to even establish itself is good legal representation, to help stay ahead of their regulators.
From the article you pointed at:
By mid-February, #deleteuber had slowed to a trickle and Uber's top executives were exhausted. Kalanick and Michael booked their trip to Malibu for what was supposed to be a weekend of rest and recovery. Instead, Kalanick was reading Fowler's post.. [which] had already gone viral.
You’re not forced to be on Facebook but if you’re not then you’re the one person people will always need to do extra work to invite. And that’s for friends, without Facebook you won’t even hear about public events until after they have happened.
Don’t get me wrong, we always invite the two guys without Facebook, but I know both of them feel a little shitty about having to be extra trouble.
Eventually people will leave, and someone have to take the first step, but that’s a really shitty step. The reason I say eventually, is because nobody uses Facebook for anything but events, I haven’t used messenger since they forced you to use the app and I’m not the only one and when I look at my news feed none of my close friends (or myself) have posted anything since New Years.
So Facebook have become a satellite network we check for events, and that’s one step from being obsolete.
This is anecdotal of course, but it is true for both my and my wife’s friend circles.
In some ways this should be self evident. If they had the tools or connections to enact real change, they wouldn't be forming mobs on social media.
I run a successful s/w company that was recently under targeted attacks by one of these hashtag campaigns. The gist was we wrote something about why we refused to hire women simply to improve the % of females in tech and why we want to hire the best people for the job irrespective of their gender. The goal of the post was to help people correctly contribute to gender ratio problems instead of blanket hiring, which is sexism by itself.
However, this backfired and a lot of feminist groups targeted us with hashtags and some even accusing us of things we never said/done (the blog post has been removed since). They created memes, fake citations of stuff me and my company staff didn't say and they revolted heavily.
At first I was really shocked as this was my first time experiencing something like this and I almost thought my company and brand name was doomed. However, I decided to take control and published a follow up post of things we said, we did, we didn't do and we decided to stand by our words. The hashtags multiplied, some even threatened us legal action. Many created fake accounts on our blogs and commented bad stuff about us everywhere. Some of them even sent emails directly to our customers!
But, I didn't give in. A week went by and things started looking better. The hashtags dropped, but the good thing was, from those hashtags, we got a LOT of new page-views and signups. We lost two customers who didn't want to be associated with our controversy, but we got 8 new ones after this campaign.
The biggest take away -
1) If you believe in something, don't give in to threats and disrespectful demands. It's almost like supporting extortion.
2) Any free marketing is good marketing.
I suppose this was no different for Facebook.
Cure vs prevention. If you write a blog on behalf of a business, perhaps ask someone to read it over - preferably someone who holds the views you seek to attack.
But no. Somehow, even with a declining youth demographic and widespread reports of less time spent on site and the CA fiasco, they still ended up with a growth of users in all markets.
I've wondered sometimes whether we're headed towards a post-privacy world, and what it'll look like -- not just one in which there is little privacy, but one in which privacy is not something that most people think about or value.
Post-Privacy means no one can get privacy even if they want it. That has never been the case.
What you are merely seeing is people are ok with the amount of data that has been collected on them. The lack of true widespread outrage means we are either at the limit or we can still collect a bit more before users get really pissed.
We are already there.
3-letter govt agencies can listen track your calls, intercept your browsing and read your email.
Unless you pay in cash and shop only at your local mom and pop shop, your purchases are already being tracked and reported.
Your cellphone carrier is selling your information to third parties.[1]
You may not be on Facebook or WhatsApp but all your IRL friends and family are. They have your phone number in their contacts list and they have shared it with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and God knows how many other companies. They have taken your pictures and tagged you.
Other than a very small number of privacy-conscious people, which includes living-off-the-grid doomsday preppers, the rest of the country is already there.
1. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3233211/security/mobile-ca...
Constraining the discussion to America, you’d be far more wrong to assume someone doesn't use the internet[1][2] or a cellphone.[3][4]
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/05/some-america... - Only 11% of American adults don’t use the internet. Of 18-24 year olds, only 2% don’t. 2%. Holding narrowly onto your assertion, the numbers are higher for poor, rural, elderly and non-high school graduates.
[2]http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-20... - 68% of adults use Facebook. 73% use YouTube. Looking at 18-24 year olds, 95% use YouTube.
[3]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/28/10-facts-abo... - 77% of adults own a smartphone.
[4]http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/ - 95% of adults own a cellphone.
Shopping at mega corps? Well, it’s well documented that Walmart has done a good job of decimating local economies and there is definitely a homogenization of retail options in the US - but even if you don’t shop at one of them, if you use a credit or debit card, a mega-corp is tracking you. Doubly so if you use a smartphone.
The earning statement is for Jan 1- Mar 31 ONLY.
The Cambridge Analytica story was released around March 18.
So around 10-12 days of #DeleteFacebook would NOT have any noticeable effect on their earnings.
What would actually be noticeable would be Q2 Earnings (Apr 1- Jun 30)
The fact is, if it hasn’t been observed by then it’s probably not happening at all.
That's a big assumption. The metrics we're shown might not have enough resolution to show the effects of 10-12 days of scandal. The fallout may be a much more gradual process than you assume.
For instance: take this scenario: someone decides to #deletefacebook, even though they use it daily as a communications tool. What do you think they'll do? You seem to assume they're ragequit immediately, but I think it's far more likely that they'll dial back their usage, explore replacements for certain features, exchange alternate contact info with FB-only friends, etc. Only much later will they actually delete or show a significant usage decrease.
That scenario isn't hypothetical, it's exactly what I'm doing. I've made the decision to disengage from Facebook, but I still show up as an active user because I'm not done with the process.
If you're going to measure a phenomenon with data, you have to understand what you're measuring and have an instrument that will detect that. Otherwise, it's just sciency voodoo.
Targeted ads are fine to me. My bigger concern is the vast amount of data sharing on the back end that is easily non-anonymized and FB is a huge part of the problem.
This is actually the widespread attitude I imagine in a post-privacy world. It's different from people not understanding the implications of targeted ads and unknowingly accepting it. In this case, it's people that (presumably) understand this, and say, "well, that's okay."
My main frain from using facebook is not so much the visibility but the permanent nature of having personal stuff on the internet. I wonder how other people caring about what goes public deal with the issue.
Say, if I check my FB twice a month to stay informed about events I might participate in, I'm still counted as a monthly active user, but I'm not active in a meaningful sense.
Similarly, many people might stop interacting with FB (which, if nothing else, takes time to register: at least a month).
Personally, I logged in for the last time in (I believe) 2012, but I won't delete my account just so my name stays "reserved".
I think we already live in that reality. The media really honed in on the sharing of your friends list in the case of CA but if you think about it, there are plenty of services where that is public by default (like Twitter). I don't think most people consider that to be sensitive information.
So it is because Facebook is primarily meant for the latter type of data that most people outside of a very vocal minority don’t have a problem with their privacy practices. That, combined with legislation that will decimate any chance for the rise of a viable Facebook competitor (such as GDPR), is why their numbers will continue to grow for decades to come.
I think it largely depends on who your friends are, and who you follow. All the people I follow on twitter for tech news were ranting and raving about all the FB scandals. Not a single one of my friends or people I follow outside of the tech bubble cared about it, most had no idea. If people spend their time on FB and insta, it's not hard to understand why they wouldn't even be aware of what was going on.
Global growth is not necessarily a sign of health for a company, in the long term.
If post-privacy worked both ways, I'm all for a future like that, it would be a transparency utopia.
Senator Dick Durbin: Would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?
Mark Zuckerberg: Um... [Long hesitation] No.
Senator Dick Durbin: If you messaged anybody this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged?
Mark Zuckerberg: Senator, no, I would probably not choose to do that publicly here.
This stock is going to be back to its 190 price levels soon enough and anyone who isn’t on board is going to be left with the FOMO.
If we see a significant dip in Q2, then perhaps we can surmise that this impacted revenues negatively.
Not only that. Most people welcome the attention. The people who are fighting for privacy of their friends and family are the ones who don't get it. Friends and Family want to be out there, in the public eye, liked and commented on.
Point is, if you are upset, and I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't be, then the focus should be on the difference between tax on income vs capital gains / dividend income.
You’ll also have the problem we already have today, where individuals would construct their lives around a closely held corporation. When the corporation is closely held, income is supposed to pass through to the individual for taxation, but the incentives to evade theose rules would be much stronger.
In my perfect world most government revenue would come from land value taxes, with a smattering of Pigovian taxes on top, to the extent that the bureaucracy required to levy them wasn’t too onerous.
My ideal practical tax would be just a straight sales tax and nothing else. Income = Consumption + Savings, and since we want to encourage savings and investment it seems better and simpler to just do it that way.
Total libertarian dream scenario is no taxes, and government funds it self via slight inflation as a tax.
The first 6/7 is a condescending description of something obvious that doesn't respond to the OP's post, then reads histrionics into the post, then in the final sentences veers towards a real explanation, only to leave the rest as an unobvious exercise to the reader.
You just about have to make a million dollars per year in the US - and be in California or NYC - to pay 50%. One million dollars in income gets you to about 47% in LA, SF, or NYC. A quarter of a million dollar income will get you up to 35% - and those are the most expensive tax locations in the country.
$50,000 (the US median full-time income) gets you a combined effective rate, before deductions, of: 16% in Dallas, 20% in LA, 23% in Portland, 16% in Seattle, 24% in NYC, and 22% in Boise.
In Seattle, Miami, or Dallas, you'll pay a combined 36% on one million dollars in income.
Lots of people in Europe. Which for sure is also a big market for FB. In Germany you are already have deductions of nearly 50% if your income is around 50000€.
According to [1], the gross/net difference would be about 34 % in the worst case (highest tax class, no children, not married etc.), which includes social security, health insurance and so on. The calculator gives realistic results for my own income.
Netto: 2.456,06 € 29.472,66 €
which means 40% deductions. Which is approximately what I meant (yes, 50% was slightly too high).
With the “and other witholdings” it's pretty easy to hit, as typical withholdings beyond income tax include state and federal payroll taxes, employee share of group health insurance and HSA withholdings, pre-tax parking withholdings, retirement contributions, etc.
If the government here offered a quality of life equivalent to what I experienced living in western europe I'd be fine with it. But we are not getting my 35% worth of government service
No, it doesn't.
It put you—in 2017, the number is lower in 2018—assuming no deductions—at a combined 37.3% marginal rate, but a substantially lower overall rate.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/facebook-may-make-tons-of-mo...
Facebook has begun running TV ads to counter anti-Facebook sentiment:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/25/17280902/facebook-ad-abou...
They have also replaced their chief privacy officer with a former FCC chairman.
Having said that, there's movers in the space - we just need more adoption. I'm looking at a new wave of products like Sociall to step up: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sociall
Though maybe there's already existing products out there that could pivot to claim some of facebook's space.
However, I can't see how I increase their revenues with that one 60 seconds (or less) session per month. And I am quite sure there are lots of people doing the same.
Many users don't delete their accounts, but keep using messenger only. Messenger still works even if you disable your account (but others will not be able to find you by search).
I was also blown away at their low effective tax rate.
Also, the tax figures have seasonality. Q4 is highest, Q1 is lowest. This quarter's effective rate was up by 100 basis pts yoy.
Some coverage, subtitled:
https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/304jmbv5l/california-north...
It's the same for Google. Might be a weird one-off due to the new tax law.
https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2018Q1_alphabet_earnings_releas...
You also can't expect to see the full impact of Cambridge Analytica scandal so soon. Let's see what happens over the next 12 months. Facebook engagement was already in free-fall last year, and I imagine a lot of people disengaged with Facebook after this scandal, and they plan on using it much less in the future, even if they don't actually delete their accounts. Eventually all of these scandals (as well as the future ones) will catch-up with Facebook.
http://buzzsumo.com/blog/facebook-engagement-brands-publishe...
Interesting this is the exact same number Google posted yesterday. I guess I should just incorporate myself for tax purposes. Sure must be nice.
I don't know. Think I've observed a general drop in engagement in my relatively well-off and educated social circle. If Facebook dies, it's not going to be sudden. #deletefacebook type-stuff may be more akin to lifestyle advertising than the buy-it-now kind.
There are clearly very intelligent people and seemingly without a conscience, and who even admit that they would do things in untraceable ways, including in part under and between different company names; not a stretch to imagine activities happen on no books with no trackable gain given in exchange -- or even in plain sight however people erring on the side of doubt and disbelief. We have the evidence smacking us in the face every day though. The result of Cambridge Analytica's activities, seemingly along with Russia's help - directly or indirectly I'm not sure, is getting someone like Trump into office, along with apparently winning elections in other nations around the world.
I'd say very high-stakes they're playing for, positioning someone in as President of the United States to align with Russian motives, along with the shit going on with Syria and nerve agents actively being used.
It's certainly rallying the world to align for good, to align for accountability - against those who are acting bad.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-median-pay-240000-20...
edit: salary package (salary, bonuses, and stock grants), not salary alone
> we calculated as actual salary paid to our employees for 2017 [...], actual bonus or sales commission earned by our employees in 2017, and the value of equity awards granted to our employees in 2017
Specifically, if you joined in 2017 the value of your entire initial stock grant was used. This skews the median quite a bit. For example, if I joined Facebook in 2017 at $150,000 and received a $400,000 RSU stock grant vesting over four years my median annual income for the purposes of these SEC calculations was $550,000 (even though most of that is in stock vesting over the next four years).
But over 2018, FB would book $0 of that RSU even though you vested $100k worth.
When the RSUs vest, they are taxed as income. If you hold on to the shares for a while before selling them, and they increase in value, you'll pay capital gains taxes when you sell them.
US/Canada is ~10% MAU but generates ~50% of the overall revenue.
I wonder why US generates so much revenue compared to its small user base
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_marke...
The businesses that wants to run ads also spend a lot. Its also true for Enterprise Software to some extent. I work for an enterprise software company and despite having had a decade of presence and having been founded in Europe, 70% of our revenue is from USA.
While I don't have numbers to back it up, personally from my experience, I see Americans spending a lot (sometimes more credit than savings itself) compared to other developed nations.
https://mises.org/wire/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-state...
Now, if you want to talk about Quality of Life, instead of per capita income, I think there's probably a lot more going for the EU - much lower crime, better infrastructure, less absurd politics, more vacation. I'd definitely live in Nice over Minnesota, and I love Minnesota.
There is not less absurd politics in the EU. It's every bit as crazy over there right now. See: Italy, Hungary, the extreme right in the Netherlands, Greece, Poland, Denmark's recent policies on immigrant ghettos, and on and on.
The EU includes a lot of mid-tier countries. Poor people in the US get free healthcare and average welfare benefits that are far higher than the median incomes of all the mid-tier nations in the EU. The OECD better life index has persistently indicated that the US poor live better than the poor in any other nations except for half a dozen or so (such as Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland). In the US it's primarily the 20% group above the poorest 20%, that do the worst compared to other developed nations - they often make too much money to qualify for free healthcare, their income potential is weak, their education opportunities are weak, they suffer much higher rates of bankruptcy, and they often don't qualify fully for traditional assistance programs (housing or food).
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe
[1a] http://news.gallup.com/poll/21346/crime-rate-lower-united-st...
Citation needed.
If you remove prescription drug ads from US TV, you'd get a similar picture.
I have not looked at it when I worked for Facebook, so this is pure speculation, but I would suspect that this is due to saturation and data quality:
- ads are auctioned off at the equivalent of a second price meaning, an ad buyer pays enough to compensate for the second best offer (compensating for expected conversion); if you look at the revenue as a function of ratio of ads to customers, that means that there is a discontinuity when (targeted) ads become more common than available slots: they bid against each other and not against poorly targeted ads, raising the second price;
- ad targeting: there are more specific targeting options in the US; I was very taken aback to see ethic background was one (at the request of minority advocacy groups, actually); I suspect that gender orientation is; a third party was also offering income-level (an option now discontinued after the CA scandal); there are more. Better targeting allows far more valuable ads, but higher value per clic but also a higher conversion, which means a higher auction level (bid * estimated conversion).
There's ambiguity in the current title with the idea of the earnings sliding (which they didn't).
Alphabet: $9.4 Billion [0]
Facebook: $5.0 Billion [1]
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q1...
Google's VC investments booked a ton of gains all-at-once in the quarter (due to an accounting change) which won't be recurring. About $2.4bn added to net income.
EDIT: Also interesting to me that US/NA makes up ~12% of users but ~60% of ad and payment revenue - a sort of downshifted Pareto principle.
Are instagram dau included the dau numbers?
If not, anyone know how to back out those metrics?
> The numbers for DAUs and MAUs do not include Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users, respectively, based on their other activities on Facebook.
The average US user is worth > $100 / year now (forward looking) in advertising revenue.
Advertising works because it increases spending on products by some larger amount. Say this is 2x since there is significant risk and a lot of friction to overcome.
This means that on average, a US person spends something like $200 a year because they saw ads on FBs network.
This is simply astounding. Assuming 300m US users, this works out to $60b per year.
Kind of the opposite of free.
As much as I hate ads, this is a very poor way of understanding how advertising works.
Thats what you call "printing cash".
Should make for a nice tombstone.
That's for 50% sales growth, 63% net income growth. That's a bargain in this market.
Microsoft has hardly net grown its income in a decade and it's sporting a 30 PE; nearly all of their valuation increase the last five years is multiple inflation. Coca Cola has a 30 PE ratio and nearly zero growth for a decade. The same for McDonald's. Boeing has a ~25 forward PE ratio for ~10% growth. Walmart is getting a mid 20s PE for barely any growth. The same pattern holds true across most of the traditional blue chips. It's even worse for other tech companies, the PE ratios there are hilariously inflated, from Workday or Salesforce to nVidia to Activision to Netflix & Amazon.
If anything Facebook is considerably undervalued here vs the wider market. (note: I have no position in Facebook)
When this market changes, some of these companies might suffer more than the others. What is going to happen to advertising budgets (practically their only source of revenue) in the next recession? Facebook also faces higher regulatory and reputational risk (in the US and elsewhere) that most of those companies. But of course compared to Netflix it looks incredibly undervalued!
Edit: to be clear, I agree that Facebook's valuation is more reasonable than it used to be and more reasonable than other "similar" companies (but not without its own risks). By the way, it will be interesting to see how the sentiment around different sectors changes in September when a number of companies currently in IT and Discretionary/Media will be reclassified into the Communications sector.
There's a general theory that advertising is a zero-sum game. In other words, as a percent of GDP it has neither grown or subtracted significantly since it's wide spread use. This effectively means that new media (FB/Google/etc) is simply taking market share away from other disparate providers. If anything, a recession will only accelerate that trend. When companies are faced with re-thinking their ad spend and realize that their eyeballs are no longer in print/radio, it serves as an easy to stomach switching cost decision.
[0] - https://stratechery.com/2016/the-reality-of-missing-out/
Well ya, it's directly correlated to the general economy. The economy tanked in 2009. But that's my point, that 10% dip is going to cause everyone to reevaluate their advertising budgets and shift to more efficient spend.
https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9351759/ad-blocking-controvers...
> growth and margins are likely to suffer.
> they can only increase market share up to a point
Why? There's still 2/3rds to grab. Thats A LOT.
Negative market conditions also give companies like FB a better chance to buy up competition.
And damn, that tax rate is insanely low. Looks like they're settling into around 10% effective tax. Average across profitable companies is ~25% according to an NYU study I linked to below. Damn.
www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/datasets/taxrate.xls
Either that or accounting practices that go way above my head...
This isn't limited to ads btw, when I used to work at a restaurant we'd be noticeably slower during Q1 because people had less money saved (or were more aware of how much they have been spending lately). Similarly, when I worked retail our store "goals" were much lower as well (they usually picked up again late spring/early summer).
Definitely not quadruple, but taking into account a number of other things - like online spending - ecommerce etc, it's not hard to see. I also believe (no proof, gut feeling) the metrics are similar for appstore purchases.
For reference, the EU minus the UK has a GDP per capita of about $33,000. The US is at $60,000.
Europe as a whole (minus Turkey), has a GDP per capita of about $27,000. The total European economy is very similar in size to the US at roughly $20 trillion. There's $14.5 trillion inside the EU minus the UK, and about $5.5 trillion outside of it.
When there is too much shareholder pressure to extract money from struggling companies, those companies tend to struggle.
Is it because of Europe being more restrictive on how much user data can be used for advertising?
Source: http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/differences-privacy-la...
> 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
On December 22, 2017, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the Tax Act) was enacted into law and the new legislation contains several key tax provisions that affected us, including a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21% effective January 1, 2018, among others. We are required to recognize the effect of the tax law changes in the period of enactment, such as determining the transition tax, remeasuring our U.S. deferred tax assets and liabilities, and reassessing the net realizability of our deferred tax assets and liabilities. In December 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff issued Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 118, Income Tax Accounting Implications of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (SAB 118), which allows us to record provisional amounts during a measurement period not to extend beyond one year of the enactment date. As a result, our provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and our diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017. Since the Tax Act was passed late in the fourth quarter of 2017, and ongoing guidance and accounting interpretation are expected over the next 12 months, we consider the accounting of the transition tax, deferred tax re-measurements, and other items to be provisional due to the forthcoming guidance and our ongoing analysis of final year-end data and tax positions. We expect to complete our analysis within the measurement period in accordance with SAB 118.
[link] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
1) Revenues are inversely proportional to number of active users, hinting at cultural differences (e.g. US users may be more exposed to ads than EU users)
2) Overall income has fallen, but so have taxes and operating margin, leading to higher net income and earnings per share.
Can I subscribe to facebook and opt out of all advertising and any data sharing exposure with third-parties? That is totally worth $8-10/mo to me.
Edit: I get it. You don't like this idea, or you don't think it will work, or you don't think facebook's investors will like it (full disclosure: I am one). Why on earth should that stop me from putting my obviously flawed opinion out there that I am sick of being the product and I'd love to opt out of that process?
So no, you can't subscribe. It wouldn't work.
With current numbers the way it could work is if those users make annual commitment of at least 500-1000 USD or 200-400 dollars / quarter.
So the users with loud ethical voice and concerns about negative affects of advertising can save the world from this whole tracking business by committing about 1000 dollars a year.
You can opt out. Don't use Facebook.
In 5 years, it should be $24-30/month
But the advertising market is enormous (see Google's growth in the past 5 years) and Facebook has a lot of room to grow its share.
For email, one can pay for their google apps tier, which doesn't have ads, but it is obviously targeted to business users, so the value prop is completely different anyway.
You can install uBlock Origin in all your devices.
That’s, assuming that you are not using AirBnB, Uber or Tinder.
Also, you would need your friends to opt out too? Or at least turn on timeline review.
It seems paradoxical to share your information and also require it to be private .
Re friends opting out, no, you would just need the system to exclude individuals who have the opt-out attribute from the graph search. But I do also have timeline review turned on and have for years.
I get that I am probably a minority user of Facebook, in that I have very customized security and privacy settings. To me, there has always been value in choosing with whom to share certain information. It isn't a global binary function.
What if you weren't tagged properly also and your friends share information about you? Then hypothetically your information would be available on Facebook.
Thanks for answering my questions!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/422035/facebooks-quarter...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273963/quarterly-revenue...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272746/microsoft-corpora... (keep in mind that Microsoft's fiscal calendar is different, so it ends up being the same time of year)