Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
investor.fb.com
investor.fb.com
It's an incredible achievement to bootstrap a social network to the leader in its category in less than a year. And it demonstrates the power of Facebook and Instagram in being able to drive traffic.
It must be comforting for Meta to know that if they wanted to build a leading TikTok competitor or any other social network in the future they can easily do it.
I want smart people and weird but interesting schizos, not my "friends" from Instagram and Facebook. I mostly like those friends but I know their opinions on most things already for example.
Also unless one is being particularly pedantic he already has the only tiktok competitor (Instagram reels).
I'm really surprised to hear that. I don't really use either but wow.
Of course Meta is doing everything to make Threads work, and Elon is doing everything to burn X to the ground, there's that :P But yes it is impressive.
Feels a bit misleading by FB
And the audience on Threads is very different from X so engagement will not be all that comparable.
They already did. It's called Reels.
I don’t know why people trust stats from any social media company without independent verification. Stats can be massaged and there are large incentives to do it.
We know that the former Twitter board certainly did this, for example.
Nearly every ad lately is either Tesla, or weird fan groups like "Elon musk highest iq to ever live" and someone has built a massive network of bots for "Elon musk sexiest man alive".
https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...
Their engaged audience is skewing older which is why it "feels" weird to you but not to everyone.
My fear about LLMs emerging as a commonplace computing tool is that they seem like such an obvious target for a whole new type of advertising & propaganda. Whatever you think about the potential for something like "superhuman AGI", it seems clear to me that LLMs have the potential to become better and better at generating text that can convince and persuade.
My nightmare dystopia is that we end up in a society where we're constantly interacting with LLM agents all the time, and they're so undeniably useful that we don't want to abandon them, but buried deep in each of their prompts is something along the lines of "prioritize being really good at your main task, cultivate trust and dependence in the user, but in the background always be looking for ways to subtly influence them to be more likely to support our sponsors; here's the current list of sponsors with weights based on how much they're paying us ..."
Although more charitably, a future apologist—who maybe has good intentions, but hasn’t stepped back to gain context and realized that their projection is at odds with the systemic incentives in play.
They are:
- pay a monthly subscription
- rent out your brain for computational power in a SAAS startup
- ads
Their only real competitor in terms of market share right now are Sony's Playstation VR headsets, and Meta is easily outcompeting them. The HTC Vive is far behind in sales, and Apple hopes to sell as many headsets in an entire year as the Playstation VR2 sold in the first 6 weeks (which is still impressive considering the order of magnitude price difference). Everyone else seems to be in enterprise-sales mode, which drives profit but not market share. Well, except for ByteDance's Pico, but they don't seem to be doing great outside of China.
The nerd Internet was the best, but it's never coming back.
The bandwidth gave us streaming - okay, I'll give you that, but we had that before. It's more of an infrastructure thing than "interesting" tech.
With AI, it's going to get even worse. I mention that in this new post I just wrote: https://renegadeotter.com/2024/04/22/artificial-intelligence...
"You need to install ad trackers on your website to get the most out of ad platforms like Facebook and Google Ads. Ad trackers can create issues for healthcare marketers by sending visitor identifiers and health information to platforms that aren't HIPAA-compliant."
I'm sure they are good folks, but what an absurd premise. Something about the best minds of our generation selling ads....
Source: https://www.freshpaint.io/hipaa-compliant-advertising
Everything else has been OK.
And beat saber is a surprisingly fun way to do some cardio.
They’re good. They aren’t killer.
And that $4 billion is just per quarter. I honestly would love to see a full breakdown. Nintendo's entire revenue is 12 billion, which is less than Meta VR spends alone, and that includes everything Nintendo does, including developing games. How has Meta spent so much and has so little to show for it?
I don't know exactly how much they're losing on each Quest they sell, but the fact that it's significantly cheaper than any "dumb" headset that requires a PC or PS5 to do all of the heavy lifting, despite having what's effectively an entire smartphone built-in says it all really.
Their accounting could massively hurt the VR industry (to the point, the comment above about how it’s too bad VR can’t be profitable).
IMO it’s not AI or VR that will take over, but a combination of the two.
Just offering some advice I think they reap what they sow with their unfortunately overfitting in their main? choice of applicant.maybe I’m wrong
To be fair to Facebook - they actually did offer me an interview
TLDR; im a self made millionaire now I’m just saying the people you want are the ones that don’t apply, too busy coding instead of applying to FAANGS
We don't know how much Apple spent on Vision Pro.
The project has been going on for at least a decade.
Recently picked up a Quest 3 and it's honestly astonishing. I (half) joking had the thought when they get to the Quest 5 or 6 and can get the cost down humanity is gonna be in serious trouble. I brought it to a family gathering and one person went out and bought one the next day. Another is going to pick one up as soon as they can find a good deal used.
Horizon worlds is admittedly a little goofy but this is one of the first revision of it. And it works well as drop in for some Apps like escape rooms which probably saves some dev work. I only breezed through the report but it looks like their numbers are up massively YOY.
Only complaints is passthrough is still a little distorted but an enormous improvement. Battery life could still be better but a battery pack helps balance the heatset anyway. Also you can't directly connect to steamVR without going through Quest link which I can't see any reason for other than being anti-competitive and user hostile.
The matrix is coming and I got a feeling metas gonna own it.
As a 40-yo VR enthusiast, I can't play anything that requires elective X/Y movement (first person shooter) without getting sick. The "teleport" mechanic is really clunky.
My kids can play anything and never get sick.
My parents can't even do a driving sim without getting dizzy in a couple of minutes.
Of course, N=1...
I have 12-14 year old gamer nieces and nephews. They simply don't care about VR.
Even at a family gathering with the host having a Quest, no one cares to even try it out.
It was just absolutely nothing to do them.
Personally, I have been waiting for VR since the early 90s and the Lawnmower Man.
With having no interest in games, my experience is exactly the same as my nieces and nephews. Just a whole lot of nothing. I almost wonder if people who post things like this are not some kind of viral marketing because this is just not reality.
There’s about 30 million children in the US in the right age group for using VR headsets, and over 20 million Quest headsets have been sold. It might not be accurate to believe that most children will accept VR, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility especially since the MAUs for adults are terrible.
20M units sold is tiny for a consumer electronics product, BTW. I work on Android Tablets, and we have ~300M MAU. Phones are 3B. 20M makes VR only about 20% of the market size of AndroidTV, which has about 110M units sold.
Yes, I agree that VR is not popular with most of the adult population. At the moment, VR has a similar stigma that computers, the internet, and video games once had. It will likely stay that way until these children become adults, unless Apple can refine “spatial computing” fast enough to overcome the stigma.
I honestly don't see the trend that you've been describing among my kids or their older peers. Honestly, NES is this generation's NES; I was shocked that "Marios & Bowsers" is now a playground game (it's basically sharks & minnows), and my kid will spend hours playing MarioKart if given a chance. My kid is an avid gamer but his favorites are all the Tower-defense games you get on Google Play, as well as classics like Tetris or Candy Crush and racing games like MarioKart.
I think there's also a trend - particularly among affluent families - of going back to basics and going outside for face-to-face entertainment more. IMHO the 2010s were the high water mark for gaming, and that if anything the trend today has been to detach from devices and have more actual experiences.
You’re right, but tbf you’re filtering for upper class families
You're in the first phase. Maybe the second phase won't arrive for you.
They're extremely exciting, but seem to get a little same-y or something. Only insiders really know, but there might be a bit of an invisible ceiling that somebody still needs to figure out how to break through in order to keep engagement up. It might be a killer app, it might be a further advances in mixed reality, it might be continued reduction in weight or increases in display quality, but it also might just be that there's an inherent limitation that prevents them from taking over the world. Not every cool gadget does.
I can definitely see the novelty wearing off given enough time, same as anything. Plus to your point you can clearly see apps follow one of a few formulas.
I think the closest comparison is that VR right now is like PDAs in the 90s. Yeah, everyone knew they were the future, but the hardware absolutely blew, And it took another 10-20 years to arrive at the perfect form factor of a smartphone. Lots of hardware innovations need to happen for VR - hell, not a single consumer headset has shipped with a vergence-accommodation conflict solution. But give it another 10-20 years and I am certain we'll be seeing that smartphone type moment.
This is the least cyberpunk sentence I've ever read.
Is this true? I have a quest 2 and just downloaded the steam link app and it seems to just work. Are you talking about wired?
I could be mistaken, but I believe they were the ones to pioneer varifocal displays, a technology which has still yet to ship in an HMD. The earliest prototypes relied on physically moving the lens, where the latest prototypes are using some form of electrically charged lens that changes its focal distance based on voltage.
Once you start going down the rabbit hole of projects they've either announced or have been leaked it's easy to see how you could spend that kind of money, and that's only the stuff we know about.
There are some crucial avenues of research Meta is working on. Varifocal, form factor, face / body tracking, resolution - once these things are nailed, and I'm pretty sure it'll be in the next 10 years, then suddenly we're gonna WANT to be in Horizon Worlds. But it can't happen without massive R&D on the hardware side.
After all, when I go to the movies I don't go for a Disney cartoon but an action movie.
The user-generated content in VRChat is so much more compelling. It also looks better. And it's actually harder to do it.
I would have agreed if Reality Labs was its own startup but they are supported by Meta. With that said, $12BN profit in one quarter for Meta is somehow "struggling"?
Wait until you see the wave of unprofitable AI startups and companies raising capital forever without a path to profitability in sight.
Meta can afford to spend billions into Reality Labs, until that unit itself becomes profitable. They are totally fine and it is still business as usual and they will be sitting comfortably for another decade.
The rest of the so-called AI startups taking in VC capital on the other hand...
Eventually we’ll probably move to a single OS that runs everything, your phone , computer , vr, will all be a single device( or course us old folks will probably still prefer monitor so).
Not saying they're the same level of difficulty/tech, necessarily, but there's a reason we have the term Hype Cycle. We had one for VR about 25-30 years ago. Recently, we've had Second Hype Cycle... maybe next it'll be for realsies or it'll be Third Hype Cycle for VR?
Apologies for the jadedness, but... you see enough of the meta at some point :)
EDIT: What's the actual killer app for VR for the general population ? We're already over-saturated with a plethora of entertainment.
This replaces the computer for most people. With Windows on ARM you could probably build something like this today, but it's still too billy.
If I had a billion dollars I'd be working on a single device that replaces everything. Your phone, your TV( or at least sync to it so content is seamless). Then I'd sell it below cost with a subscription of some sort.
With an open source model at a reasonable markup.
That's the endgame for Meta. You'll never leave their new ecosystem.
How, exactly, would that work? You'd stare intently at the virtual keyboard? Or just think about "thing" and it'd magically appear? Voice recognition is actually pretty decent as a non-magical thing that sort-of-works-well-enough.
> If I had a billion dollars I'd be working on a single device that replaces everything. Your phone, your TV( or at least sync to it so content is seamless). Then I'd sell it below cost with a subscription of some sort. With an open source model at a reasonable markup.
I love the gusto! I hope that -- once you have a billion dollars -- you'll stick to your principles. I think getting to a billion dollars is -- in itself -- a selection effect/bias, so...
> That's the endgame for Meta. You'll never leave their new ecosystem.
If they're good enough... even their employees won't want to.
It's money IRL that Meta wants. That's the end game.
EDIT: Just to add: Absent truly Matrix-level VR, people will still be able to tell and unless you're a FULLY committed to solipsism or almost-as-absurd levels of apathy... well, it's going to cause tensions :)
If you don't like that you can always use a Bluetooth keyboard instead.
This already exists.
Assuming it ships that's already half way there. Another way to accomplish what I'm thinking of would be to basically cloud sync your user sessions between your phone, computer and headset.
Famouser last-words have never been spoken. You must be from the venture capital spheres, I take it?
Even if we have all of those tech today, it will take long time to make it a mass production. IMH it will take at least decades to get that level.
Rokid connected to a device in your pocket is already pretty close to the same experience.
We have the display now. It's not too far of a leap to see a full built in computer. As is, I can just plug it into my phone and that's pretty close.
I'd love to be able to get some work done with just my glasses and maybe a Bluetooth keyboard ( this would be optional since finger tracker would also work )
If you see how poor Horizons is compared to something like VRChat that operates on a shoestring budget compare to meta's. Or something like viverse.
Their hardware is OK, but not groundbreaking. Their metaverse platform is really poor compared to the competition, although what they do have over the others is the ability to create in-world instead of in Unity. But really that doesn't stop creators. The environments in VRChat are much more compelling. I think part of this is Meta's way too strict moderation and content policy. Because really for adults a rubber-tile child playground is really just no fun. We need a bit of gritty.
So yeah really they're doing it wrong. I don't know how they do it exactly but clearly all that money goes to the wrong places.
I don't think this means VR is a bad idea. It can work, just not the way Meta thinks it can.
Someone make it make sense
It isn't that hard to figure out that one has been extraordinarily bullish and priced to perfection and one has been extraordinarily bearish as if they are going out of business.
This is continuously adjusted as investor sentiment changes about where the company (and the economy at large) is going and what that “10 year valuation” is. A single quarterly result certainly could change that number if there’s a big surprise in there, but for the most part companies are good at predicting their revenue and expenses and that is priced into the stock already.
For Tesla, there was a wide expectation that they weren’t going to have a great quarter, it was pretty much known. So the stock was already significantly down before the earnings call. What was not expected was that Musk dedicated the company to building a cheaper car in the coming years. Investors thought this was a good move, stock goes up.
Now look at Meta, it was widely expected they’d have good results this quarter, so stock price is already up recently. What changed in this report is their expenses are much higher than what they previously estimated. So the stock goes down.
The actual quarterly results are a factor in the price but generally those are priced in already, unless you get some big surprise. What’s more important is the investor sentiment about whether the company is going in the right direction, which can change on a whim and for no reason at all.
> Facebook daily active users estimate: 2.11 billion
> Facebook monthly active users estimate: 3.08 billion
> Average Family service users per day estimate: 3.16 billion
> Average Family service users per month estimate: 3.97 billion
If I'm parsing this correctly, they have around 3.16 billion DAU across all services. That's an insane number of people.
Which really makes me wonder why their social media platforms suck so much. I recently re-opened Facebook and it was a desert wasteland with a handful of people I knew years ago sharing memes. Instagram has a few more users than Facebook, but aside from catching the occasional story update from a couple people, I mostly use it to follow artist accounts. And nobody that I know is participating on Threads at all.
It seems really difficult to find anything interesting on their platforms. On Facebook I looked up groups for some of my interests, and they're either completely dead or being kept alive by occasional posts of creators sharing their latest releases.
So what are these 3 billion people even doing on Meta's platforms?
Also, there's a lot more people using FB than you think. Most people over the age of 50 are on FB, not IG/reddit/Tiktok
Total available attention is finite. Yet content keeps exploding. There is only one conclusion.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/meta-platforms-must-face-adver...
Basically, never ignore these things.
I also remember around Google's IPO people questioning how they'd ever make money.
It's good you have that attitude otherwise it would be gambling.
I dismissed as a stupid novelty that's not worth the time to set up an AWS instance. Lesson learned: don't listen to HN.