Meta Reports Second Quarter 2023 Results [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Meta Reports Second Quarter 2023 Results [pdf]

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55 pointskgwgk34 comments

It's incredible how one of the largest companies in the world can still sustain double digit revenue growth after nearly 20 years. Not to mention mid single digit growth in MAU and DAU

If you believe what media and popular social platforms report you would think no one uses Facebook anymore.

It is fueled by the advertising race (companies bidding against each other to complete for consumer's attention), which was in turn fueled by the monetary policy (effectively giving companies low-interest money hoping they would come up with the next TikTok).

In other words, we injected money into that sector, so we saw it growing. The question is, how far can it be sustained after the interest rates are up, and whether we could possibly lower them without immediately triggering another inflation wave.

>It is fueled by the advertising race (companies bidding against each other to complete for consumer's attention)

Exactly but I would like to add that the companies which are in the advertising race are most likely monopolistic competitors[0] or in another words, they have very similar products and the only way to reach customers and to build brand is to invest heavily in the advertising. That's why advertising will stay strong and viable as a business model for very long time.

>In other words, we injected money into that sector, so we saw it growing.

But if the money is not used efficiently and if no innovations come about then no matter how much you invest, you won't see a sector growing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition

do you trust the numbers are correct?

Lying to investors is a pretty serious crime, so the numbers are probably correct.

People say in America you can get away with anything if you're a billionaire.

Not true. The crime of defrauding your investors will land you in jail even if you're a billionaire. I'm proud of America.

Eventually.

It does take ~10 years in practice for people to notice the lies and for the FBI to finally arrest you. At least in Enron or Worldcom cases, these things can go on for a very long time.

USA is eventually correct, but we take our sweet ass time getting there.

Is it lying if you just don't put the effort to identify and flag bots?

Falsifying scientific research involving hundreds of millions of dollars is serious crime too, and yet the president of Stanford and researchers at Duke are where they are.

I have no idea what goes on at META or any other public company. I just know people have repeatedly underestimated the odds of misrepresentation in the past.

One of the selling points of buying shares of businesses publicly listed in the US (and some other countries) is that the probability of the numbers being correct is very high.

The closest a report like this could be to "incorrect" is poorly planned short-term/long-term tradeoffs. You could, for example, renew an expensive contract with a vendor for a 1 year term instead of 5 years at a lower annual price. This quarter's costs will go down significantly compared to the last time this contract was up for renewal - but now you need to add the same cost to your ledger next year instead of 5 years down the line. Repeat that same short-sighted planning many times over and it's possible to fabricate a profit increase. But that will only last so long. It could work for people prepping for an IPO when they plan to essentially pump-and-dump. Not so much for a mature public company.

I have been using Facebook a lot more lately as more communities move into Facebook Groups and Reddit gets steadily worse (and I mean the Reddit community, not the Reddit software, which is also degrading). I'm not happy about it, but it is what it is. I'd much rather be on good old forums with a different user account per community.

I had good luck on the marketplace. And kids stuff daycare is there (private of course)

There are some other apps for daycare tracking but they're terrible. So I guess it depends on what you compare fb to. I'm pretty happy with it for the most part

I'm actually using Facebook a lot lately after having sworn off reddit a long time ago. Cursed AI, a group related to the kind of car I own (report/sharing problems), local news...

I don't really use it much for the social stuff.

and if you listened to hackernews they'd tell you that startups are the only way to go

cuz those boring corpos cant get tiniest shit done without months of emailing and 25 ppl involved

> > If you believe what media and popular social platforms report you would think no one uses Facebook anymore.

Facebook is where real life is at. Nobody uses twitter (now X) to organize things, Instagram is just for advertising already established companies and for brands.

Facebook, meetup and Eventbrite are the places where the very first steps of every local community are taken, but Facebook is superior of course because you can bounce back between building a community and talking to your friends and family, plus you can directly reach members of communities which kinda do the same thing as what you have in mind.

Facebook is essentially the 'do stuff' social media, whereas Instagram is the 'promote stuff' social media and Twitter is the 'dunk on other people and start flame wars' social media.

Unironically if the goal of your online presence is to wind up doing stuff in the real world, then Facebook is the only game in town.

Yup - quit Facebook some years back with no regrets, even despite this, but the reality is that it means missing out on high school reunions, something I will never experience in my life because FB controls it.

>you would think no one uses Facebook anymore

Facebook Marketplace is a killer product imo. Depends on your location so probably not in the US where Craigslist exist, or Gumtree in the UK, but in a lot of countries the digital classified market is very barren. Facebook Marketplace is basically filled up the niche perfectly. I really like it and use it almost everyday, pretty much my only use case for Facebook nowadays.

Same with WhatsApp. It would be impossible for me to have a social life without WhatsApp. It covers so many groups.

I managed to get some groups of technical friends to move to other products but I don't think that would be possible with other people.

WhatsApp is not just the default group messaging app.... I don't think non-technical people could even name another. Maybe iMessage? But that's only for small and more affluent friendship groups. I don't think anybody would ever have an iMessage group for an apartment building or amateur sports team. It wouldn't even cross anyones mind to use it.

Craigslist is toast in the US. Still operating but FB marketplace is an order of magnitude more effective and popular.

Or perhaps the metrics are more engineered than we realize? It is the more parsimonious explanation.

Groups groups and groups! It really gave FB a second life. Reddit shooting itself in the foot probably helped too

I don’t know why people are saying FB (the product) is dead.

People still use it. Yeah my feed is mostly crap, but I still see friends posting and sharing stuff. Groups especially are very popular.

Whereas on Instagram they just post a story once a month and have next to zero permanent pics. It’s mostly the messaging feature in IG that’s useful, for people you’re not actually friends with.

Nobody I know uses Twitter.

Tiktok is strictly for kids and is pretty much a joke.

Friends are 20-40 years old, non-US. Within this demographic, social media isn’t what it used to be 10 years ago, but FB is still the dominant platform by a mile.

Impressive turnaround from the post iOS 14 stock price devastation.

Link to an actual article/release/links:

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

The "actual" release is the one submitted with the SEC, everything else is just BS.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001...

Yes, the one of their website might have more data, but will likely have more lies too.

Their Metaverse strategy is pretty much dead. Zuck didn't even utter that word during earnings. I guess it must be giving him chill after going through the roller coaster ride of their stock price swing. I don't think they are going for another rename anytime soon. But, when they'll - what they would like to rename to? I hope not GenAI. It's naive to name your co after a tech. Microsoft didn't call themselves Windows, then a rename to Azure, then again to ChatXXX :-)

Meta earnings official page - https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

Fud. He discussed metaverse on the call, sees eventually 2 bln+ smart glasses market powering in-app monetization, essentially flipping APPL’s script of big margins from device and app sales / platform lock-in.

What are you talking about? He directly addressed it a couple times and ended his remarks on it: “Moving onto our product roadmap, I've said on a number of these calls that the two technological waves that we're riding are AI in the near term and the metaverse over the longer term.” “As our investments in AI continue, we remain fully committed to the metaverse vision as well. We've been working on both of these two major priorities for many years in parallel now, and in many ways the two areas are overlapping and complementary. The next big thing on the Reality Labs side is the launch of our Quest 3…” Source: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q2... From the press release you linked: “Finally, for Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem. “ They’re digging in even deeper, despite the incorrect superficial perception they’re done with it.

So what happened to all the reports, predictions and prophesies of Meta Platforms Inc. formerly known as Facebook sinking all the way to the ground and never recovering because of Zuckerberg to the point where not only the stock crashed, but some wanted him to resign.

I guess you can now blame him for the rebound in Meta's stock from $90 to $320 in less than a year had you bought there and not listened to the hysterical news and pundits proclaiming the death of Meta Platforms.

Hilarious how opinions have changed more times like the weather now. So such of these calls of Meta crashing to the ground and never recovering was of course greatly exaggerated.

Not really special to them, and I don't think they're an outlier, but: 16% effective tax rate.

I wish per country data was available. I’m currently trying to estimate Facebook’s ARPU per country.

Out of curiosity – what is it that you're doing that's so granular that the ARPU by region [0] they provide isn't good enough?

[0] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...

I have a country level variable and I want to run a basic regression.

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