Zuckerberg Has Burned $500B Turning Facebook to Meta
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Meta case could be seen as leadership trying to seem innovative to make up for their core products possibly being in trouble, because they have the immediate threats of saturating their possible userbase, the rise of Tik Tok which they cannot just buy, and the Apple ad targeting limitations.
I don't know if that's true, but it's how I imagine other investors seeing it.
Google renamed the parent when there were substantial different activities occurring in different non-Google divisions. It made things clearer.
Also Facebook expects people to call it meta whereas Google basically expects to continue to be called Google.
Google is one of the most recognizable companies on the planet, yet made the parent company some ridiculous name. To me, that reeked of trying to protect the other properties from the stink of privacy invasion.
Not everybody. I've been in the "Facebook is overvalued" camp for many years.
It has never been a forgone conclusion that Facebook is an institution that would be relevant for decades. Something its share price would suggest.
Its core product (high value & high volume groups to advertise too) can largely disappear within a year, and the only semi-effective coping mechanism it has displayed is buying new brands.
A public company's market value is simply its current share price times the number of outstanding shares, see https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketvalue.asp.
Using fluctuations in market cap is a tried and true method of churning out nonsense “content”. I assume there are simple algorithms that basically write the whole article based on the market cap change in last day, week, month, year, whatever the article’s publisher wants.
Over time, either the users will evolve to make the abuse less effective (equivalent of "banner blindness" of early web advertising), use technical countermeasures (ad-blocking, alternative clients, etc) or use their political power to vote for regulations that will make outlaw said abuse. A mix of all of these is currently happening.
The only areas where this kind of adversarial relationship will work is if the adversary has no choice - such as military/defense or law enforcement for example (military enemies can't vote, suspected & convicted criminals can but the feedback loop is so long that it's not going to have effects any time soon). But if the adversary has a free choice, over time they will exercise that choice which will reduce (and eventually eliminate) the profitability of abusing them.
I don't see this - or any other business built primarily on advertising and "growth & engagement" - as a winning long-term strategy.
This has been my thesis re: FB for a long time now. Using fear, hate, sex, etc to manipulate higher engagement from users isn’t sustainable. It’s abusive and eventually people will move on.
Apple made its intentions public. It was the market that mispriced the impact.
AAPL is 10% off it’s ATH, GOOG about 15% off it’s ATH, MSFT is 20% off it’s ATH. FB is doing far worse than other big tech.
What?
No doubt this article rubs shoulders with others that say GDP and stock prices don't mean anything, our societal obsession with them is absurd, and we should measure Gross Happiness Product instead.
They absolutely do not, but it's an attention-grabbing headline. The financial media have a stupid obsession with trying to provide reasoning for stock gains and drops. They're definitely not always right, and it's annoying.
They never named their things and it become a ubiquitous blob (I swear they had a dating site but I looked and couldn't find it)
Their only UI is hidden behind the status landing page.
They could have made sperate websites with branding "by Facebook" redirected users to those new sites from the main page/menu. Instead it's completely. Monolayer/single stack. Not to say "this is wrong" (clearly it made many people lots of money up to this point, now those returns appear to be slowing)
The landing page is full of things to look at, but hard to "find the thing I want to do". In this sense splitting the main app and chat made a lot of sense (primary entry point is app launcher on the phone).
What it really needed was a way to organize the landing page around product listings. Ie: a second desktop. (This could already happen on users phones, though I suspect most people weren't based on what I've observed on family and friends)
That's also the only page I've ever seen Facebook let you use multiple accounts...
> Facebook’s user base has started to shrink after revelations by whistleblowers and leaks that showed how harmful social media could be to teen users, who are flocking to less toxic competitors like TikTok anyway.
LOL.
The problem with all these 'services' is that they need 'user engagement' to make money. They take different approaches to addict users; triggering outrage in the case of twitter, triggering aspirational yearnings in the case of instagram, voyeurism with tiktok, and so on.
They are all toxic because they need to profit from user attention.
Although big corporations are not exactly known for their altruistic nature, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30381990 for a recent example.
In the future you can hear Zuckerberg saying, “all those privacy issues were regrettable issues with Facebook, not Meta.”
The hope has to be to create a platform. Sell devices. Take a cut from App Store sales. Some advertising, but not nearly as invasive or core to the business model.
(Myspace isn't dead though I don't know their 20 year looks better that s&p average)
I didn't realize at&t bought myspace.
This “awakening” to the risks of Facebook are leading to lawsuits, new laws, etc which are also decreasing potential revenue (in addition to customers leaving).