Lower revenue than Q2 of 2021 and higher expenses. They're on track to have significantly lower net income this year than last year.
Au revoir, Facebook.
Au revoir, Facebook.
Meta's operating income (i.e. profit before taxes and interest basically) for this past quarter was $8.3 billion. That's roughly the same as Exxon did in its Q1. "Au revoir" seems premature when they're still raking in that much cash.
I love how people keep saying Facebook is dying, yet TikTok still doesn't have as many active users as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
The only application that does is YouTube.
Facebook has ~2.9 billion monthly active users.
These are stats from Q1 2022.
FB's products are trending downwards and TikTok is trending upwards. FB has pulled out the stops to stop the slide but has yet to find success doing so.
If FB doesn't arrest the slide from relevance it's only a matter of time until TikTok catches it in absolute terms. The salient question isn't whether or not FB is bigger right now (the answer is unequivocally yes) but whether or not they can halt/reverse the decline of their product.
Facebook:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Family Apps:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/947869/facebook-product-...
So assuming they're just an online entertainment company, Netflix is higher, Twitter is about the same, Disney is probably on the up, Activision and EA have similar downward trends, so I don't know, might still be too noisy to tell.
Personally if I were a betting man I'd be shorting them hard. People are quickly souring on the entire social media industry. There's no reason it had to stay around
Modern day Linux on the Desktop.
Then they'll be as dead as eternal money-losing cash pit Uber.
someone whispers in my ear ... correction, I'm being told Uber is still not dead.
I know, I know, I'm as confused as you are.
Don't be, for the last decade or so money has been extremely cheap.
For anyone focused on fundamentals many of these companies don't make sense and it all seems eerily similar to the dotcom logic (anyone old enough will remember claims of "new economy" and "things are different"), but for anyone interested in growing their money, spending more than you make while money is essentially free makes a lot of sense.
The thing many people still don't understand is that the era of cheap/free money is coming to an end and there is going to be a lot of reality coming to surprise companies that aren't actually able to become profitable in an era without free money.
This doesn't just impact companies that currently don't make a profit, but those that make their profits from other companies that don't make a profit. How much AWS is paid for by startups that don't make a profit? How much of meta's ad revenue is ad-spend from companies that don't make a profit?
We'll soon be finding out.
Don't think dethroning the lizard king is going to be that easy.
That said I laughed out loud to this. I’m not a FB fan because of all the dark patterns.
Edit: Added “only”
Life and work are nearly impossible here without Whatsapp.
Looks at TikTok...
The only way forward is for them to kick out Mark, stop the insanity that is Metaverse, focus on their core and play nice with the platforms and regulators.
It might be hard to convince him to give himself the boot, especially while the company continues to make gobs of money. Maybe we'll see a compromise where the company starts paying a dividend and Zuck shovels the rest of the cash into his passion project.
In any case, it will be interesting to see how the Metaverse thing will eventually perish.
In what way? If Facebook wanted to replace the iPhone with some "metaverse" device they would need to be able to build a device way more advanced than their current offerings at a price point equal to or less than the iPhone. That means they would need to make up for thousands of person years of engineering, manufacturing, and operations expertise that Apple currently has.
You're basically saying "If Facebook could build a copy of Apple from scratch and make some compelling products, they could be the next Apple". Samsung is an industrial behemoth and just keeps up with Apple.
Not only is that unlikely it doesn't even sound possible.
And if they achieve it then it will be a game changer as big as the internet or smart phone.
It's not an anti-capitalism stance to call Metaverse idea for what it is - trying to sell an elephant. Capitalism is not about going all in on the craziest ideas ever.
What is their bet anyway? What users' need are they trying to address or create?
Is this a new and better video game platform? Even if they are successful, VG are still very niche, especially compared to their social network user base.
Is this a new way to consume content? Sounds a bit fussy to me to have an extra device or two just so you cannot turn away when they run ads. People still are not that eager to put on 3D glasses to watch a movie. Are they betting that in the nearest future the reality is going to suck so bad that people would want to escape it? That's just bleak. What else? Realistic porn? Virtual learning? That's peanuts.
Is this going to be augmented reality instead? Some kind of wearable device? We already played with google glass, did not catch on. Plus regulation in many countries already caught up, so you cannot just wear video recording device whenever for example.
Who are the end users? Who has hours of time to consume uninterruptedly whatever content they can provide in their Metaverse? Certainly not the people who has money to spend.
In the end it's an adversarial design to capture all users' attention for prolonged periods of time, the pay off for the user has to be astronomical.
It is Roblox. It is a collaborative building environment where the content that people create and share for one another is the interactive world rather than text, photos, or videos, done through VR rather than traditional computing.
This is the first time I am hearing about Roblox, looks video games adjacent to me. Meta would not be able to convert their billions of users to a similar platform.
They have to convince users to give up the time they spend now elsewhere on this experience. I suppose it has to be insanely addictive and rewarding, and also it has to have no barriers of entry.
I am just not seeing it in the Metaverse. I mean people gave up the horizontal video format in order to easier consume media, and Meta is trying to convince everybody that people would wear or implant (?!) a devices to have better fidelity video experience? The entertainment value is just not in the resolution and collaborative content creation is already possible without Metaverse and is niche.
At this point I consider the Metaverse idea just smoke and mirrors to convince investors that they have the next best thing with 30% year to year revenue growth. I don't think Meta would go anywhere soon, they're just hitting the ceiling of easy money they were making and now it's getting harder to have such margins.
They're essentially trying to _create_ a new need in the minds of consumers, I think.
The trouble for them is, this rarely works. This is quite different to, say, the iPhone; when the iPhone showed up, the market was already inclined to think "it would be nice if there was a good phone that could do more stuff than my Nokia"; it wasn't specifically demanding an iPhone, but an iPhone was a good solution for what it was demanding. It's not clear that anyone is demanding a 'metaverse'.
The FB discussion isn't about anti-capitalism. It is the general theme of HN.
Like most HNers you are lacking imagination in what VR will do. Just like everyone who poo-poo'ed what is possible from Computers, Internet, Mobile Phones.
Yeah before iPhones, we already played with Palm Pilots and Microsoft CE hand held devices.
End users are all of humanity (minus some stubborn Luddites. But you never invest / build strategy around luddites)
If VR helps you master skills better, help firms to be more productive, that in itself is a good enough use case for everyone to use VR
The fact that VR systems can provide experiences closer to reality means the applications are boundless.
You seem to make a lot of these sweeping statements. They're full of stupid assumptions and generalities. It's a boring shtick and I'm not really seeing you back it up with your dizzying intellect.
Besides being casually insulting to a huge group of people you don't know, it's also a profoundly stupid assertion.
There's no subset of people on HN that at any point poo-pooed computers, the Internet, or mobile phones. A significant population here have been involved in building those things. You're trying to assert that because someone isn't fawning over wide eyed promises of some technology they're some sort of backwards Luddite.
History is littered with technologies that did not revolutionize the world. There's little guarantee VR isn't going to end up in that heap. It's had a lot of promise for decades. It's got fundamental technological, ergonomic, and physiological problems to overcome before it's going to be attractive to anyone but enthusiasts. Even then there's no guarantee that it will take off in a significant way. Even if VR takes off there's no guarantee and little indication that Facebook's vision of VR will take off.
I was there when engineers of the 80s/90s poo, poo'ed commercial success of the internet.
I was there when engineers of the 90s poo, poo'ed iPhones (it's just a drive with a phone jack that can make calls)
I was there when engineers of the 00s poo, poo'ed Twitter, Instagram
Yes, I have sufficient data to safely conclude that smart people close their mind pretty early in their life (A curse of intelligence). There is in fact plenty of research around this. That's why you end with Grammar Nazi's, Language Nazi's, Social Media Nazis.
Very few escape the curse of intelligence (why would they? They pretty much get a cushy job and can lead a comfortable life with their blinders on).
> I was there when engineers of the 90s poo, poo'ed iPhones (it's just a drive with a phone jack that can make calls)
>I was there when engineers of the 00s poo, poo'ed Twitter, Instagram
A good portion of HN was also part of all those conversations, I know I was. Suggesting the zeitgeist of any of those fora was poopooing new technologies is ridiculous. The fact those fora were enabled by those technologies should tell you that your position is absurd.
You've created a strawman out of a fantasy cohort of technology enthusiasts ignorantly poopooing technologies. Because you can easily beat up your strawman you seem to have convinced yourself of your own superiority.
Maybe you should take your passive voice casual insults to some other forum. Go wow them with your Brobdingnagian intellect. Your valuable insights will be sorely missed but you're wasting your time here.
One day HN will be irrelevant, as the true value creators will move on to something else. As a superior prognosticator, I'll know when and I'll leave ship.
If Facebook can solve all these huge technical hurdles they need to do so in an affordable device. Then they need to develop the operations capacity to actually build and support them. Then they need to make a compelling experience that normal users would actually want.
Facebook does not have a history of executing on those things. They also don't look like they're making any moves to be able to execute on those things.
So clearly Meta does know to ship a popular device at scale.
You'll also note 5 million is a twentieth of Apple's iPhone sales. So even if Facebook solves all of their other problems they have to ramp up production 2000% to "replace" Apple.
That is a heavy fucking lift from where they are right now. When the iPhone was released it did what dumb phones did and then some. It's killer apps were the media playback and the Internet. Facebook has yet to demonstrate a killer app for their VR.
Once upon a time Apple was a much smaller company. They strategized to one day have something they called a "dynabook". Their first attempt, the Newton was not good at all and much too expensive.