Meta's AI Abundance

> Meta makes an absolute killing with ads by dominating much of the internet now, usurping the throne from google.

That (the usurping the throne from Google part) seems wrong to me. Not sure if this has changed in recent years, but Google and Facebook/Meta ads always seemed very different to me. I.e. Google had such specific search intent so it was possible to target items at near the point of purchase so effectively. Facebook/Insta ads were more about introducing people to new products by knowing so much demographic info about people.

In my experience, the ROI on Facebook ads in specific verticals was absolutely horrible. For example, banks and fintechs are willing to pay a ton for customer acquisition because these services are so sticky - get a new banking customer, and often you'll have them for life (changing banks can be a major PITA). But for all the people mindlessly scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, very few of them are wanting to go check out a new bank account opportunity while they're looking at funny cat videos.

Again, not sure if this has changed recently, but search ads and social media ads always just seemed to have very different purposes to me.

If AI can help an advertiser get the outcome they want in 1000 ad impressions instead of 5000 ad impressions (with more precise targeting or more appealing creative), Meta can 5x the price of those 1000 ad impressions, keep the advertiser happy with the same ROI they had before, and sell 4000 additional impressions to someone else as incremental profit.

Or they could 4.9x the price to show the current advertiser a better ROI and encourage higher spend from them, while still having the 4000 extra impressions to sell.

It's way higher. I experimented with targeted search ads to try and sell some copies of Conveyor (a developer tool for desktop app devs, see bio). It was a waste of time. Google took a pile of cash and delivered zero conversions. It turns out that the conventional wisdom is now that search ads are too expensive for small companies. It's also extremely complicated. Even with a lot of work on targeting, the traffic you get is junk and it's hard to track conversions. I suspect most devs just block ads and never saw the ads at all, even if I was charged for them.

If Meta can use AI to make niche B2B advertising work better then there's still a lot of room for growth. Like, if there was a way to get AI to advertise my product to people asking frustrated questions about how to deploy their desktop apps, I'd be very interested in an offer like that.

They're also thinking about tapping into small-scale "mom and pop" shops, with lots of "AI"-augmented services, like customer support, translation, seo, marketing copy and so on. If they find a good price-point for that, they could bring in a lot of revenue from that side as well. They control lots of entry points for a lot of users, between fb, insta, whatsapp and so on.

B2B is kind of weird in advertising - you are still just selling to a person. So even Facebook advertising is used in b2b because targeting by job title/interest area is strong there.

IMO there isn’t much of an upper limit, as long as roas is decent the limit exists elsewhere (manufacturing, people, etc) and any gains in those areas means more advertising spend is viable.

Hyper targeting can grow the advertising pie. Eventually meta can become basically "the ultimate salesman" hand delivering users to 3rd parties that completely fulfill a problem the user has. The amount they could charge to completely take care of all user acquisition(especially if theres an implied threat of "we'll take all your customers to your competitor if you fuck around") is astounding.

I don't know why you're being down-voted. The societal implications of Meta's products are profound and as yet poorly understood. I always encourage friends and family to remove social media apps from their phones. The thought of AR glasses controlled by Meta creeps me out.

Technically true but till date all the evidence about people weaning off it is against it. The social media addiction has become worse over the years and the companies serving this are valued at trillions. So what you say is technically true but it has a smaller chance of it happening than meta failing to monetize AI

Sounds pretty obvious, why would they be doing something that would hurt their business metrics - which are correlated with increasing ads ROI since it unlocks higher spend.

I think this might be a general reference to the ever declining efficacy of manual targeting after ATT/GDPR.

So even if automatic (black box) targeting merely maintains its effectiveness, it’s relatively better for advertisers to shift spend towards it at the margin.

I think another mistake is people thinking metaverse = VR. Metaverse is a catch all term for the post-smartphone internet. Things like the RayBan glasses, Orion, that EMG wristband they showed at connect, etc. are all part of that.

Anyone who sold their meta stock certainly regretting it. what a comeback.

The stock dropping below $90 coupled with all the blatantly untrue “no one uses meta anymore” posts on reddit seemed to be sheer stupidity tbh. They were reporting earnings and user growth at the time. It’s now >$570, a similar rise to Nvidia.

It should be a lesson in doing the opposite to /r/stocks sentiment. (They also had tons of posts on why shorting nvidia would be a great idea a year ago).

Basically do the opposite to the most uneducated group of investors you can find and you have a good chance at making money off their bad trades. Don’t try to inverse the large firms with huge amount of research. Just inverse reddit for easy money.

They're spending more on VR in 2024 than 2023. As much as it's laughed at, I believe VR/AR will be a big platform, it's still growing healthily. And it's pretty awesome, go try the Quest 3. Most importantly for Meta, they completely own VR at this point. There's so much hardware and software that needs to be developed in order to compete that I doubt anyone can do it at this point. Apple tried, but besides the high price the software is just not mature enough, it takes many years to develop all the necessary parts.