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.
> 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.
reels is simply nowhere as addictive as Tiktok. Tiktok blows me away with how interesting/eclectic my feed is. Reels is like watching funniest home videos with Bob Saget by comparison.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
I stopped looking at facebook a month or two ago because it suddenly became 99% spam "suggestions" from people I've never heard of before. Complete turn off. I might peek once in a while to see if it's been unfucked, but I have zero interest until it is.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's the hardware, man. The software practically doesn't matter until they figure out the hardware. If they went all in on adding all the necessary features to Worlds right now, they'd end up having to change things later on to accommodate whatever form the hardware ends up taking.
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.
Yeah horizon worlds is really bad. In their push to make it child friendly the whole thing has become a bland playground for kids with nothing to offer adults.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
That's why the actual end goal for everyone working in this space is Mixed Reality (AR/MR/XR) in a glasses form factor that replaces your phone. It's obvious that's what Apple is targetting, and Meta have also demo'd similar tech they're working on at the Quest events they've held the last couple of years.
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).
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?
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.
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.
> "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...
I think OPs concern is not for Meta, but ability of startups to raise funds. If Meta can't make profit or product even after spending 10s of billions, the chance of a startup is near 0.
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.
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.
The stock market is a measure of what investors think the company will be worth over the next 10 years or so, essentially. Because if someone came along and wanted to buy the company, they’d typically pay around that amount. So take that amount (what the company is valued at) and divide by number of shares, there’s your share price. Like anything, it’s worth what someone will pay for it.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
They already did. It's called Reels.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
We don't know how much Apple spent on Vision Pro.
The project has been going on for at least a decade.
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.
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
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.
Everything else has been OK.
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).
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.
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...
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Someone make it make sense
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.
Deleted Comment
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.