Grab some tissues: Facebook's user base and profits shrank, tanking Meta's share price
- Reference: 1643874253
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/02/03/facebook_q4_2021/
- Source link:
The company on Wednesday reported its Q4 and full year 2021 results, revealing the company earned $33.7 billion for Q4 and $118 billion for the full year – respective year-on-year rises of 20 per cent and 37 per cent. Net income for the quarter was $10.3 billion, a dip from Q4 2020's $11.2 billion. For the full year, net income climbed 35 per cent to $29.1 billion.
Meta measures Facebook's engagement in four ways: daily and monthly active users, plus family daily and monthly active people.
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The daily active users stat fell for the first time ever – albeit by a small margin – from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion. But to discover the dip, you need to delve into Facebook's slide presentation – the press release rounded the figure up to 1.93 billion.
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Monthly active user numbers held steady, while the family metrics each grew by just ten million people.
Company execs warned of "headwinds" such as competition for users' time (the rise of TikTok got a mention) and various factors that will slow traffic growth – and therefore the number of ads Facebook can serve and the price advertisers are prepared to pay for ads. Apple's changes to iOS privacy also hurt – and Meta execs once again used the argument that making it harder to advertise on Facebook harms small businesses.
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Increased data charges for Indian users were another factor, and made it harder to recruit the younger users Facebook and Meta have said they covet.
One of the products designed to lure those youngsters, the "Reels" short video service introduced to counter TikTok, has grown well — but execs warned it "monetizes at a lower rate" than other products.
Advertisers are also telling Facebook that their budgets aren't huge: between inflation and supply chain challenges, they're probably going to spend less.
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[6]Meta says it's building world's largest AI supercomputer out of Nvidia, AMD chips
[7]Meta trains data2vec neural network to grok speech, images, text so it can 'understand the world'
[8]Billionaires see wealth double during pandemic as tech bros lead the charge
The balance sheet wasn't helped by big spending on metaverse-related matters that saw Meta's Reality Labs unit lose $3.3 billion for the quarter and $10.2 billion for the year, on revenue of $877m and 2.3bn respectively.
But there was some good news for Meta's VR business, with sales of virtual goods on the Oculus Quest content store passing the billion-dollar mark.
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said that R&D conducted by the Reality Labs team will soon bear fruit.
"We are working towards a release of a high-end virtual reality headset later this year. And we continue to make progress developing Project Nazare, which is our first fully augmented reality glasses," he said.
The news wasn't all grim. Meta also revealed average revenue per user grew from Q3's $10 to $11.57 in Q4, beating market expectations. Earnings per share also grew, but not as much as expected. That's one reason for the dramatic share price plunge, but it needs to be put in perspective: Facebook/Meta's shares traded at around $250 in mid-2020 and grew rapidly to settle around $325.
On Meta's earnings call, Zuckerberg also mentioned Facebook's substantial investment in improved privacy. The company's many scandals in that field never delivered a share market reaction to match today's. ®
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Re: Deflection
Well clearly there are bigger companies then Meta, you know Google, Amazon, etc. so therefore Meta must be a small business, and this is hurting them. So you know Privacy is hurting "small businesses!" Just for a very specific definition of Small Business...
Re: Deflection
I closed my account a couple of weeks ago. I like to think I made a small contribution to this decline!
Re: Deflection
I stand corrected. How could I have missed this purely narcissistic view of one's own company.
(again a perfect fit in the " The Fine Art of Baloney Detection " descriptions)
Good news is the start of the inevitable decline, for the sake of humanity I hope it accelerates.
Already in US and Europe Faecebook had falling activity, because of its embarrassing stigma, many folk who do still use it are ashamed to admit it.
Just think - at some point in the future, the number of Facebook accounts where the user is dead will outnumber those of living people.
Metaverse
Wasting billions, just so a headcase can play with a headset.
Re: Metaverse
Billions you don't have to pay taxes on.... they took a chapter from "Bezos' Encyclopedia of Tax Avoidance". Set up some expensive (on paper) researches where you can funnel a good part of your profits, and make them disappear.
Ahhhhh
Bless!
Clickbait controversies
It is amusing how the Trump controversies fueled the likes of Facebook and Twitter. With him sidelined by Biden, the whole clickbait maelstrom collapsed.
Re: Clickbait controversies
Till the next one
Losses are a corporate bonus. You can short sell the shares before the big reveal and it also means you pay no or less tax. Not that they pay tax anyway.
You dont really understand how Shares work, do you? Companies dont profit from shares. In fact, apart from when they are actually releasing the shares (IPO, or straight up share sale), then they have no actual direct "contact" to the shares in the company. If Shares go up or down, that doesnt actually impact the company. It affects the shareholders (Investors) in the company, and they might let the Board hear a thing or two if the Shares go down, but the company itself is relatively unaffected (things like borrowing might be affected, but not that much usually).
Shorting can only be done by investors. Yes some Exec's and board members might get shares, but any body in those sorts of positions is legally prevented from trading in their shares based on information that might affect the share prices. This is very strongly regulated, and not something that anyone (apart from the terminally greedy) mess with.
As such, your assertion above is complete bollocks. Well, apart from the part about them not paying taxes. That's a given...
I read that as a veiled suggestion that corporate executives were using the information for insider trading. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you to countenance a suggestion that rich people would resort to illegal methods to get richer.
SEC would like a word with you about insider trading...
He'll just Zuck it up and wait for the stock price to inevitably rise again ... Nothing to see here, just extreme gambling capitalists in action.
Creepy but...
Their advertising misses the mark a lot, do advertisers know this or just ignore it? As an example, I have had several facebook accounts over the years, for various reasons. One I use occasionally and it keeps telling me I need to find a partner yet I have been married for over 30 years. They didn't figure that out so what's the chances other adverts will be accurate to my demographic? (they are not).
Ok I put some duff data in (DOB etc) but I don't set out to massively deceive - that's a different account ;-)
Maybe they do better with a younger age group, I know nothing about advertising, or both....
Barely use them.
I stopped FB years ago (I'm an early adopter / early leaver). After deleting my account I had to set up a new one for some charity work that I do, and I log on about once a month to check the meeting schedule. They are dead to me, and I think many will go the same way. I don't miss it.
There are some words missing...
On Meta's earnings call, Zuckerberg also mentioned Facebook's substantial investment in improved deception to give the appearance of improved privacy .
MetaFail
I really hope the Metaverse fails soon. It's an idea that nobody really understands or want but people keep investing stupid amounts of money because they think it'll be like Ready Player One rather than Second Life with adverts. The only crowd I ever see genuinely pumped for the Metaverse are crypto bros and all the NFT scam sites like Earth 2.
Correlation?
So Tech platform happy to allow the distribution and propagation of Anti - Vax bullshit has a decrease in user numbers? Hmm.... can't quite put my finger on it but I feel I'm close
Deflection
Apple's changes to iOS privacy also hurt – and Meta execs once again used the argument that making it harder to advertise on Facebook harms small businesses.
Wow, just wow. Privacy is hurting "small businesses". They are saying: It is not about our bottom line, no sir, it is not. It is the "small businesses" we are defending. Privacy is a hurdle we must overcome and we will do better as time passes to improve conditions for "small businesses".
I'm sorry, that simply does not compute.