https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...
Facebook doesn't dominate social any more like it once did. It did so with Facebook itself then with instagram but TikTok is grabbing the current generation of new users.
It can't grow like it once did and usage of its existing services will gradually decline.
It's betting that the metaverse is the next social medium after TikTok's short form video. Personally I doubt that but that's the bet they're making.
1 in 4 people on earth is using FB every day. They simply can't grow more too much.
Apparently that's no longer the case: "Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Buries the Metaverse"[1]. Company name looks just silly at this point.
Also the display ad market is only useful if you've got people to advertise to. The more Facebook continues to turn into 'social networking for boomers' the less and less they'll make.
Is Meta really a tech company? It takes a lot of technology to do what they do, just like Netflix. But their core business isn't technology pre se, it's social media and advertising. I don't think they're the same class of businesses as Microsoft or Apple. Google is closer to Meta in terms of their revenue sources, but they have a much more diverse technology offering.
They are trying to become a hardware company with their VR line, but it feels more like a hobby in the Apple sense of the term. I.e., a division with small revenues and without a clear growth path.
What is the latest cool Meta product which promises a bright future for the company? Well, llama is cool but it's not product and today's greatest social media sensation is TikTok.
I'm sure meta does have some great tech, in fact some of the work they did on VR with all these tens of billions of dollars is groundbreaking but that also failed as a product.
Why would they keep the workforce configuration the same if their current state is probably not what they want to be tomorrow?
It's not an actual drug so you can't just keep upping the dosage. I don't have the internal metrics and I'm sure they are still making gains, but I think their wave is going to be much smaller than Facebooks.
It's still very popular of course but just judging by the number of times phones have been shoved in my face to watch a tiktok at social events recently vs a year ago I have to feel their is some level of decline. I also notice that even the younger crowd isn't using it as much.
It seems to me that right now the most popular thing is sharing videos, both 3rd party and original within various group chats.
I think there is social media platform overload, and the best way to keep in touch with people that actually matter to you and be sure they see your content is having group chats where you share things and then talk about it. Just my anecdotal observation, I'm probably wrong.
It seems similar to the resurgence of piracy now that there are 50+ different streaming apps.
I’m aware of the Chinese thing and how it makes some people feel but IMHO TikTok is healthy in in comparison with the Instagram or Reddit for example. You still can spend hours once in though.
After years of stagnation with Meta, TikTok is a step forward.
Well, "addictive" literally means "cannot easily stop doing it"
Hum... Did the executives of all those large companies just happen to discover they aren't innovative at the same time? Or are they trying to prop-up their stock so they have time to exit on the prices created by the low-interest market?
One of those is way more likely than the other.
(But yeah, those companies have stopped innovating long ago.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/club-meeting-recap-cramer-sa...
This completely overlooks the changes that happened in that one year of not insane growth.
Apple cut Meta's legs off and Meta has no indication on how they're going to regrow them. The Metaverse is flopping, FB is seen as a place for hate, youths don't have accounts, etc, etc, etc.
Facebook is not the future of social media and Meta has not come up with a viable alternative.
The market has separated these 5 pretty clearly now, with Meta trailing by quite a bit, Alphabet and Amazon in the middle, and Microsoft and Apple with a decent lead.
I don't really understand why we are comparing a company who develops social media applications and generates advertising revenue against Apple who generates most of it's revenue from selling Hardware, or Microsoft who generates most of it's revenue from licencing software.
If we are saying that Meta are trailing Apple, we might as well say that Microsoft are trailing Saudi Aramco.
http://www.innovationkm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/image...
http://www.innovationkm.com/the-market-cap-of-faang-changes-...
Another way to think of it is in the 2010s, a potential employee may have ranked a job at any of those companies as having similar security, but there is probably a different feeling about that now.
Investors will tend to tolerate other faltering metrics for high revenue growth in startups, but that’s not Meta.
(obviously, the analysis is more complicated than this, but you can see why investors may not think things are going gang-busters over at Meta)
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
Public sentiment is terrible and if that's a reliable leading indicator, the company will be in trouble if it doesnt continually diversify into products that distance themselves from the core brand.
