Facebook Reports First Quarter 2021 Results [pdf]
s21.q4cdn.com
s21.q4cdn.com
I've moved several times in the last year, and (unfortunately) FB is how I:
- connect with local groups of parents (FB has no competition in this vertical)
- connect with local athletic groups (Strava and others exist, but try planning an outing on Strava)
- see what the local take-out restaurants are offering today (FB and Instagram own this niche, which has exploded)
- get recommendations on contractors, service providers, etc (often passively, by searching groups for recent answers to someone else asking the same question)
- find out about when local organizations or companies I care about are doing something (you can't really rely on libraries etc. announcing things via email anymore, but they won't do anything without posting to FB)
On top of all this, I use Instagram, not only to post photos but also to explore the area around where we've settled. I search by location a ton and have found it's a great way to learn about what people do and where they go when you're not able to meet people and get recommendations the normal way.
So yeah, I rage quit previously but FB has got my number again.
Doesnt make more sense that what you say. You ARE a facebook user.
They know that people are moving away from the broadcast style use case towards smaller organic groups.
His usage style is something Facebook is well placed to profit from.
Curious how well understood the mechanics are of this. I've been fascinated by how clever the whole model works. They know revenue growth needs to outpace their ability to increase available ad space (so user growth or attention growth). So they are heavily reliant on data to improve ad targeting so they can drive more conversion per ad impression.
The power of the ad auction model is that 100% of the improved efficiency of ad targeting is translated to revenue for Facebook. Advertisers will pay $X for a conversion in their ROI calculations - so Facebook will get the maximum amount the market will pay a certain for a given conversion. Advertisers are actually a little worst off as targeting gets better - the conversion cost stays the same and the number of impressions goes down.
To keep growing revenue at this pace, Facebook needs to continually feed the beast with better and better data so they can squeeze more and more conversions out of their existing ad space.
The only other two ways to grow revenue is more users and more time from users. Which is getting tougher and tougher. That's why this Apple fight is so important to Facebook - it's really their lifeblood right now.
Advertising accounted for $25.4 Billion of their revenue, up from $17.4 Billion in the same quarter last year, an increase of 46%
Revenue from other sources was $732 Million, up from $297 million in the same quarter last year, an increase of 146%
Without changing signals you can still make meaningful long term progress through ranking, delivery, and format improvements.
I don't debate that countries like India have large Facebook usage, but the question I asked was - is there growth coming from the young users in countries like India? Because that goes against my experience, albeit limited to Western countries.
If it's coming from young users in India and similar countries, that's really interesting to me because it shows that teenage trends are not as universal as I'd expect.
If that's not the case, then where is the growth coming from?
Genuine question (unsure why downvoted) and want to get to the bottom of it.
This isn't the best time to depend on an anti-privacy business model, it seems.
I'm still curious, but less concerned. They appear to use Cloudflare, AWS for DNS, and registered through Godaddy. I just haven't figured out who runs it. I wouldn't be surprised if it if were via business wire, but I'm surprised it's hard to find out. Multiple companys' IR teams seem to use it based on some cursory querying.
https://www.q4inc.com/products/surveillance/default.aspx is a bit disturbing, but I can understand why it sells.
> Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.85 billion as of March 31, 2021, an increase of 10% year-over-year.
Let this be another sign that Facebook's demise is greatly exaggerated: their daily & monthly active user counts are _still growing_ ... and by non-trivial amounts.
Almost _2 billion_ people visit Facebook at least once _daily_ .... that's mind-blowing.
Yes, I know: the common HN refrain is "how many are fake / bot accounts?" etc. etc. Until that's proven to be a real problem, which would lead to significant lawsuits for misleading shareholders, I will lean on the hypothesis that the significant majority of this growth is "real."
You can play "chicken little" all you want and say "Facebook will go away just like MySpace," but doubters should be sweating right now, as the numbers refuse to show that.
Too much of _anything_ is bad.
So it's a strong claim to say "2 billion people feel worse each day," when it could be that the majority use it in moderation and probably feel some positive utility from it.
come on...
Their biggest threat now is regulatory changes to consumer data. I haven’t read the filings but I’d expect their lobbying efforts to be in full gear.
I'm most sad that so many smart humans are working on this of all the important problems in the world.
Makes loads of money though, so won't change until incentives change.
Good ad targeting means:
1) New small businesses (on Shopify) can reach customers without going through retail gatekeepers. Ask any Shopify seller, nothing beats FB.
2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).
3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.
- PyTorch for Deep Learning overtook TensorFlow in Academia and Competitions and breathing down the neck in Industry despite the latter having significant inertia.
- React.js is THE hottest frontend framework now.
- GraphQL is highly adopted in the industry.
I want FB to exist as long as possible and very successfully as I do not want the tools to go away. I have worked with two of the three, and I love them. It had made me fond of and loyal to FB and FAIR.
I am not quite sure what you mean by "the hottest". Would you say that jquery was THE hottest frontend library circa 2014, or that Wordpress it THE hottest CMS now?
React is hugely popular, no doubt about it. It absolutely was the hottest frontend framework somewhere around 2015. It's more complicated now, I think.
Depends upon values and perspectives of the problem. Part of me agrees with you, and yet part of me is sympathetic to the goals of connecting the world, encouraging community discussion, and bringing transparency to social issues and reducing the power of governments to control the narratives. - to the point that many governments fear FB and ban it outright. (e.g. Do you think China banned Facebook because of "misinformation?" Or that the ratio of real information to misinformation was a little too much for them to lose control of their propaganda narratives?)
Would I say that's more important than sustainable farming / agricultural tech? I don't think so - but to each their own.
FB's targeting is pretty good, if for no other reason then because they see all the social stuff users do even without the need for crutches like third-party cookies. Likely customers are willing to pay increasingly more for a well-targeted ad.
Does daily active users mean that? Or is it just the amount of users who visit facebook on any given day?
If you don't have time for the full course, I've also heard good things about Damodaran's Little Book of Valuation.
If you check out the email archives [1], you'll see that Damodaran wrote this in the first message: "1. Preclass work: I know that some of you are worried about the class but relax! If you can add, subtract, divide and multiply, you are pretty much home free… In are you have forgotten your accounting, I have added my version (which would probably not be approved of by your accounting professor) of an accounting class to my website: http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastac... If you want to get a jump on the class, you can go to the class web page: http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/equity.ht... "
[1] http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/eqemail.h...
here's the first one in the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI
What's your take on retail investors and active investing, assuming that the retail investor does not have access to large sums of money.
I think it's worth working out the math for yourself, rather than taking anyone's words for granted. Let's say the average annualized return of S&P500 is 10% (obviously, past returns are no guarantees of future returns). If you buy and hold, then you essentially pay no taxes on your capital gains.
Let's suppose the alternative is to actively trade, and your strategy involves holding securities < 1 year, incurring the maximum short term capital gains of 37%. Let's say your strategy generates an annualized average return of 20%, pre-tax.
So the annualized net worth (after capital gains taxes) starting from $100 would be:
passive: 100, 110, 121, 133
active: 100, 112, 126, 141
So you can generate 10% excess returns, after taxes you compound approximately 2% additional take-home money each year. Then you should ask yourself, is it worth the hassle? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Some people enjoy researching companies, making predictions, and allocating capital to their beliefs.
obviously, there are ways to try and mitigate capital gains taxes - incorporating offshore LLCs, tax loss harvesting, etc. those are important considerations when designing an active trading strategy.
Separately from whether active investing is worth it or not, I think it's valuable to learn how to read financial reports and understand businesses as a projected set of cash flows, along with understanding things like balance sheets and incomes. Learning to read 10-Qs has helped me think of my own budget / personal finance planning much like a business. Financial literacy is super important, even if you are a passive investor.
The comments by Martin Shkreli I was referring to are actually in the video that you linked. The subtlety in Shkreli's comment is that he was referring to amassing "fortunes". That is where he states that amassing fortunes most likely requires using "other people's money". Which makes sense.
He cites Joe Lewis as an example of a solo investor going from "zero to hero", but I would not say he was strictly an "investor" as he was a currency trader. Also, he had initial wealth from a luxury goods business.
Just for curiosities sake, do you know of any examples of retail investors amassing sizable amount of money starting from very little?
I agree with Shkreli: if you want to "amass a fortune in a short amount of time" AND do so without taking on an unreasonable level of risk, then doing so with cheap cost-of-capital (e.g. investing friends&family wealth, using insurance float, gift cards) is the way to go.
But "making 10s of millions quickly" is a different statement than "active trading is not worth the effort".