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
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.
Meta made in Q4-2020 53.56B in ad rev in the US and Canada. Meta only made 4.05B in Asia Pacific in Q4-2020.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
> Facebook is dying slowly in the developed world, that is true. However it is still growing in emerging markets.
+1, though this is a slow and not necessarily viable bet. Meta makes about 12x more revenue from their USA/Canada ($52/Q) users than their Asia-Pacific users for example ($4.3/Q).
Market share in the USA is extremely valuable, not only for Meta, but for a lot of companies. Apple for example sits at a $3 trillion market cap in spite of Android dominating the global mobile market because iOS captures not the most users, but the most valuable.
> WhatsApp has basically zero monetization right now but billions of users. Huge potential cash cow.
I agree with this. I think there's a lot of potential in WhatsApp, though I also see two shortcomings with betting too much on it:
- WhatsApp is largely used in countries where users are harder to monetize. As stated above, user count matters, but it's not the only factor when it comes to generating revenue.
- Messaging is very competitive. A change in WhatsApp's TOS was widely reported to have triggered millions of new user sign ups on Telegram and Signal after just a few weeks [1]. I don't how accurate or overblown this correlation might be, but I do know anecdotally I text people through many different apps, and have switched the primary app I used to text different people multiple times in the last few years.
> Instagram still has a ton of potential for further optimized monetization.
I think this is still the most straight-forward path to increasing revenue Meta has, and I imagine they're trying to make sure it doesn't fade away like Facebook is.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/24/whatsapp-...
I feel like instagram is no longer an actual photo sharing app, just a place where high profile users promote stuff to their followers.
The West is mostly so far behind on payment processing it’s a joke. Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 while WeChat Pay is 0.6% and Alipay .55%.
Why not just use a database?
FB picking up Libra is just another loop in the blockchain’s solution in search of a problem.
Venmo and Zelle are both irreversible and mainstream but can't be used globally.
I think this right there is the biggest issue for the companies that sell consumer data. Google has had so many golden eggs, office365 before Microsoft, the cloud infrastructure before AWS and so on, and they keep fumbling the ball because their organisation is geared toward a very different form of sales.
The fact that Instagram didn’t become an Etsy styled platform for artists when it was the main platform for sharing semi-professional “hobby” work should tell you everything you need to know about how little Facebook understands markets that aren’t selling privacy data. Because even if they opened up now that ship has sailed as less and less people who produce things rely on Instagram as a platform because the younger audiences aren’t there.
> It’s a slight earnings miss. The price will rebound in the morning and it’ll be back up in a week or two.