[HN Gopher] Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
___________________________________________________________________
Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
Author : jsrn
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-04-24 20:12 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (investor.fb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (investor.fb.com)
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Results look good to me, EPS about double yoy, reality labs still
| losing billions. Stock down 12% after hours though so I must be
| missing something I guess
| nextworddev wrote:
| guidance not that great, also crowded trade
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Revenue down from last quarter but q4 is usually good for
| adtech I think. Next quarters guidance seems decent to me but
| I guess market was expecting more. q1 2023 was definitely a
| bit of a low point for meta so the yoy stats might be a bit
| misleading but hard for me to be upset about anything here.
| Ad impressions up 20% again somehow lmao
| matsemann wrote:
| It's so weird to me. My Facebook feed is dead, no one posts
| anymore. The last weeks they spam me with notifications about
| nothing to get me back in and creating fake engagement. "Peter
| you added as a friend in high school but have never spoken to
| since or ever interacted with on the platform commented on a
| meme page, check it out".
| kredd wrote:
| Facebook is just groups and marketplace, sprinkled with some
| ads, at least for my age group and area. But groups are very
| active, especially neighbourhood ones, where I get my hyper
| local news basically.
| asadm wrote:
| blue app is dead mostly. But instagram is def not!
| psunavy03 wrote:
| For when people are so stupid that reading is hard and they
| need pictures . . .
| bobthepanda wrote:
| the facebook feed is also mostly pictures and memes so
| not sure how that's any different
| jsheard wrote:
| Oof, another $4 billion in the hole for Reality Labs. I really
| want VR to succeed but seeing the biggest player by far still
| struggling to find any path to profitability (or even breaking
| even) after iterating on it for a decade makes it hard to be
| optimistic.
| harles wrote:
| I'm not sure it's a good business strategy, but I am glad to
| see ad money fueling more interesting tech than more profitable
| ads.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Don't worry. The ads come once they establish themselves as
| the dominant player.
| harles wrote:
| Maybe. It is nice to see cash transactions and subscription
| models in the space. There's a chance (maybe it's slim)
| that new computing paradigms will bring new business models
| without ads. Maybe I'm just an optimist.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| I wouldn't bet on it. Meta is leading the pack right now
| and they're an advertising company. I wouldn't expect an
| advertising company to choose a model without
| advertising.
| jrussino wrote:
| > new computing paradigms will bring new business models
| without ads
|
| 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 ..."
| ianstormtaylor wrote:
| Sounds much closer to an _apologist_ than an _optimist_
| if you ask me.
|
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > There's a chance (maybe it's slim) that new computing
| paradigms will bring new business models without ads
|
| They are:
|
| - pay a monthly subscription
|
| - rent out your brain for computational power in a SAAS
| startup
|
| - ads
| wongarsu wrote:
| But they are the dominant player, and have been for many
| years.
|
| 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.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| The days of interesting tech have been gone for a couple of
| decades now. Every technology is now being quickly
| enshitified. It's ALL about selling you crap.
|
| 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.
| autokad wrote:
| I been hearing this term 'enshitified' a lot lately. I am
| curious to its source and why it seems so much more
| prevalent recently. Do you have any insight into that?
| jsheard wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| renegade-otter wrote:
| It's when monetizing your users is more important than
| maintaining and growing your product.
|
| 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...
| scottm01 wrote:
| There's literally an ad on the front page right now for a
| YC startup hiring engineers to protect patient privacy.
| Follow the link? The company exists to better sell ads
| based on patient data (but in a "compliant" manner).
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Link?
| scottm01 wrote:
| Gone now -- I don't remember the name (unless this was
| the fastest pivot ever recorded, it was not Glass Health,
| which currently has a now hiring ad up[1])
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149581
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I hate the recent "enshittification" trend. It seems to
| come from some place of entitlement in which people think
| they deserve to get everything for free. Surprise: you only
| get what you pay for.
| anjel wrote:
| Sounds like you might have been too young to enjoy the
| 90s Internet
| lovecg wrote:
| My new high end washer and drier come with an iphone app
| that notifies you when it's done. It comes with non-
| optional spam notifications for their other products and
| subscriptions. It seems that the market of "pay more to
| get a product without ads" is increasingly disappearing.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| The nerd / weirdo internet still exists, it's just not in
| your safe space.
| binary132 wrote:
| It can come back (in a new form obviously), we just have to
| build it and secure it, and not relinquish it.
| melenaboija wrote:
| I guess something interesting will come up from this but I
| see it more like investing in technology to create new type
| of ads.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Well, there's still no killer app. The productivity use case is
| a gimmick. Apple vision pro is also not selling well. The big
| promise is entertainment but it's not there yet.
| jsheard wrote:
| It would be an anti-climax for the history books if it turns
| out we invented a device right out of sci-fi, but it's
| actually kind of _meh._
| jncfhnb wrote:
| We really didn't though. We're nowhere close to the dream
| of VR.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I wonder if there simply is no killer app using the current
| approach. Maybe we will have to hook into the brain.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Half Life Alyx was an amazing VR game. It was the only
| amazing VR game.
|
| Everything else has been OK.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Met some business dev people at Reality Labs and they
| themselves don't exactly what they are selling. Which is very
| worrying.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| It is possible that now is the right time to keep investing in
| it. They already have huge sunk costs, but a lot has changed
| since they began. LLMs became a thing. Display tech has
| continued to evolve quickly. There is more information on the
| market after seeing how products from Sony, Apple, and others
| have done. Meta also recently announced their new OS and their
| more-open platform strategy. Mobile processors are also
| evolving quickly. All of these things can open up possibilities
| - and even if it isn't a sure thing, maybe it is worth placing
| a bet?
| rurp wrote:
| Placing a bet is one thing, but Facebook is spending enough
| money to fund a moderately sized country. I don't mind that
| they are doing it though, even though I think it's a terrible
| business decision. Facebook spends plenty of money on things
| that are worse for the world and maybe we'll eventually get
| some interesting tech out of it.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| The fact that they spend more than everyone else does in the
| space combined just blows my mind. Their Horizon worlds is
| literally just a worst VR chat which was developed for <$100
| million. Their os frontent for the quest is great, but how many
| devs can you even realistically have having an impact.
|
| 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?
| jsheard wrote:
| I'm guessing a big chunk of those losses are from selling the
| hardware at a loss, which is a fine strategy if you're Sony
| or Microsoft and can easily make that money back from game
| licensing and subscriptions, but the Quest has (a) a
| reputation for people buying one and then barely using it,
| and (b) a subset of active users who only use it to play
| SteamVR games without ever giving Meta a cent after the
| initial purchase.
|
| 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.
| pie420 wrote:
| it's very obviously "creative" accounting. Facebook is
| throwing lots of other expenses into the VR bucket to make
| other departments look better.
| StressedDev wrote:
| That is a very serious charge. Do you have any proof or are
| you just making things up?
| threeseed wrote:
| In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI)
| initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were
| transitioned to Reality Labs. This also includes Meta's
| fundamental AI Research laboratory FAIR which is now part
| of the Reality Labs - Research (RLR) division.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs
| joshspankit wrote:
| This is wild.
|
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| All the ai research is under reality labs through FAIR.
| Theyre spending billions on GPU buy alone. You can claim
| gen ai is a necessity for the metaverse but I do think
| its a bit misleading to say VR lost 4 billion this
| quarter when a huge amount of that went to an open source
| LLM
| ionwake wrote:
| Why don't they just hire devs who have clearly spent years
| building their own 3d projects alone, bootstrapping
| themselves? Tbf they tried to interview me during my peak
| where I had already made my own networking engine and a
| custom 3d env but I was too scared to interview after hearing
| they prefer fresh code monkeys out of college .
|
| 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
| curiousllama wrote:
| Reality Labs includes a bunch of AI stuff. I assume a bunch
| of this is training compute for Llama 3/4
| threeseed wrote:
| > The fact that they spend more than everyone else does in
| the space
|
| We don't know how much Apple spent on Vision Pro.
|
| The project has been going on for at least a decade.
| goles wrote:
| Surprised to see so many people negative on meta in this
| thread. I've used VR at conventions and buddies houses but
| I've been holding off on picking up a headset for a couple of
| revisions until they are in their sweet spot of development.
| Where most of the kinks are worked out, there's a good
| library of Apps and games, and doesn't require enthusist
| level commitment which I don't have the time or patience for
| anymore.
|
| 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.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Im not surprised about the negative comments. I'd be more
| surprised if the negative commenters have even tried VR. VR
| and AR are just such a huge paradigm shift that according
| to the data, only tweens and children "just get it" as a
| demographic group without a lot of coaxing and explaining.
| I would say that it's their generation's NES. Being an
| adult VR enthusiast feels like being part of something like
| the homebrew computer club, well until Quest came along.
| nkingsy wrote:
| Tweens and children are the only ones with supple inner
| ear linings.
|
| 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.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Anecdotally, the pattern many of us have seen keep
| happening over the last 5+ years is that enthusiasm and
| novelty is very very high when first discovering these
| modern lightweight headsets but then usage just falls off a
| cliff after a while.
|
| 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.
| Zetaphor wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to assume that a pretty large portion
| of this is going into R&D. They've shown multiple prototypes
| that are addressing different technologies/techniques for
| improving the clarity and quality of VR experiences.
|
| 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.
| willmadden wrote:
| "The hardware isn't ready yet."
| rvz wrote:
| > "But seeing the biggest player by far still struggling to
| find any path to profitability"
|
| 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...
| xyst wrote:
| I don't see VR becoming mainstream. At least today anyways.
| It's very niche. Hardware is clunky. The software is locked to
| Apple or Meta APIs. It's difficult to explore when the
| manufacturers put up so many walls within their walled up
| ecosystems.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Today's VR is good, but not $100B market good. The SV
| managerial class has read too much into all the NYT
| bestsellers about "disruptive innovation" and now every
| goddamn product category must be "disruptive". Nothing can
| "just exist" anymore...
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Within a decade, full VR will be available in a standard pair
| of glasses.
|
| 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).
| Quekid5 wrote:
| Just like fusion is juuuuust 20 years away... for the last
| 30 years.
|
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Imagine being able to put on glasses, and instantly have
| your computer. Your hands are tracked so you can type
| without a keyboard.
|
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| They just do it wrong.
|
| 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.
| MarketingJason wrote:
| Why the drastically lower effective tax rate? I don't see an
| increase in operating expenses enough to make that big of an
| impact and I'd expect the increased income to raise it.
| sf_rob wrote:
| Conjecture, but did the prior report have a one time tax hit?
| That's fairly common.
| eclectic29 wrote:
| Why are Meta quarterly results so special that they always enjoy
| the front page of HN?
| neverokay wrote:
| It's a trillion dollar company dude. Many people laughed at
| their 1B ipo valuation.
|
| Basically, never ignore these things.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Man, I bought some stock a bit after IPO, it dropped a bunch,
| and I idiotically sold later at a slight loss in 2013 after
| people all around me constantly went on about how they would
| never make money. It's now worth 17 times what I sold at.
|
| I also remember around Google's IPO people questioning how
| they'd ever make money.
| neverokay wrote:
| Sucks right? Life gets lifey.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| I used to pay a lot of attention to the comments of certain
| HN users who made well reasoned but (with the clarity of
| hindsight) mostly doomer predictions about various topics.
| I wish I hadn't listened to them.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| i believe FB is a fad at that time. Who knew it make that
| much money and still going.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| "They trust me, dumb f*cks" - Mark Zuckerberg laughing
| all the way to the bank.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i think i sold my apple stock at $10/share. I also had my
| finger on the buy button for AIG at around $1/share in the
| depths of the financial crisis but didn't do it. Now I just
| stick to code, my 401k, and company RSUs heh.
| ambicapter wrote:
| I bought Apple stock 2 years ago and it's been flat since
| then, with me at a slight loss. So the golden tech stocks
| aren't always so.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| FAANG (or whatever the acronym is this week) quarterly results
| always make front page.
| whyenot wrote:
| For the same reason Google's and Apple's results also reach the
| front page. HN users upvote the posts. Maybe it's because Meta
| is one of the largest tech companies in the world and for many
| people their results are interesting news.
| whywhywhydude wrote:
| Because it's one of the biggest tech companies and its results
| foreshadow earnings for other tech companies. Just look at the
| after hours price movements of most of the tech stocks.
| loeg wrote:
| It's the 6th biggest company in the US.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Down 13% after hours because of guidance:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meta-q1-earnings-135049624.ht...
| jxyxfinite wrote:
| Yet tsla is up 12%.
|
| Someone make it make sense
| paxys wrote:
| Tesla promised self driving taxis and autonomous robots and
| cheaper new undisclosed products due to release soon, and
| investors bought it like they always do.
| jakozaur wrote:
| Not sure how big tech quarterly earnings fit HN guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| This community is for intellectual curiosity, startups,
| innovation, etc.
| loeg wrote:
| The same guidelines:
|
| > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Looks like something didn't quite work out this quarter:
| https://i.imgur.com/r80sPwT.jpeg
| htrp wrote:
| Is reality labs where they're hiding all the infra spend for meta
| AI?
| threeseed wrote:
| Threads has also now rapidly grown to 150m MAU with higher DAU
| than X.
|
| 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.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The scaling aspect is indeed impressive but I have not seen
| anyone (exactly zero) that I want to follow on threads.
|
| 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).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Seriousy? They have higher daily active users than X??
|
| 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.
| slily wrote:
| They must have a very creative definition of "active user"
| because Zuckerberg gets 15-20k likes on his posts while I can
| scroll down X and find several posts a few hours old from
| random gimmick accounts with many times more. Taking that at
| face value to call Threads "the leader in its category" is
| comical.
| phillypham wrote:
| Instagram shows posts from Threads in the feed. I
| accidentally click on these all the time.
| acchow wrote:
| > 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.
|
| They already did. It's called Reels.
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