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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

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Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#121

Post by inetknght »

grandalf wrote: post #88

Interestingly, I'm someone who does not click on ads, but the last 3 ads I've clicked on were on Facebook, and two resulted in purchases. I can't help it when the ads are for cool things like a $20 USB endoscope.

> I'm someone who does not click on ads, but the last 3 ads I've clicked on

I'm not sure what you mean when you say you don't click on ads.

I don't click on ads. None of the ads I've clicked on have resulted in purchases. Instead, they've resulted in me swearing at the website showing a popup or otherwise being deceptive about user interactions.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#122

Post by JCole »

solomatov wrote: post #14
omot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely insane. Should we seriously be considering anti-trust regulators to crack down on their insane growth?

As far as I understand, In the US monopoly is fine unless it leads to increase of price paid by consumers. EU probably has different opinion.

Decrease you mean I think

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#123

Post by adventured »

acchow wrote: post #116
adventured wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any real scenario, debt should obviously never be ignored, but we're counting cash in a vacuum here basically. Some of these companies are carrying vast amounts of debt now, Microsoft and Apple for example. They can't discharge all of that cash without suffering severe consequences due to their need to sustain a high credit rating. I added the ignoring debt tag, because who knows which of those cash / cash-like in…

> They can't discharge all of that cash without suffering severe consequences due to their need to sustain a high credit rating. What do you mean by this?

Microsoft for example has $76 billion in debt, accumulating at a rapid pace. Apple is in a similar situation. They're adding debt at a historic pace.

Despite the immense profitability the companies have, their debt holders will get freaked out if those large cash piles were to get discharged down toward zero. For example, Berkshire Hathaway got slapped for allowing its cash to drop a bit low (relatively speaking) a number of years ago (also coincided with the worst of the great recession), their credit rating got dropped a notch in part because of it (despite it being very unrealistic they were actually more risky just because cash was briefly at $30 billion versus $50 billion). You'll often see the ratings agencies & analysts talk about wanting to see Berkshire maintain a large amount of cash due to its obligations.

Apple and Microsoft are paying very, very low interest rates on their debt. Given the scale of those debt piles now, they'll desperately want to maintain those low rates. Maintaining a sizable pile of cash will assist them in doing so.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#124

Post by jamesmcintyre »

StevePerkins wrote: post #77

Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. Their website is almost meaningless to my day-to-day life at this point. I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off. I don't personally know anyone who still uses it regularly as we did back in 2007. I don't know a tactful way to put this... but it seems lik…

I believe Facebook is very perfected form of Dopamine delivery and it's leveraging the attention deficit behavior of entire generations. Could it fizzle out the way you anticipate? We have seen it before but if you look at Zuckerberg's ambitious vision for Facebook and the new verticals he plans to enter/trail-blaze then there's reason to assume the goal is not to ride on Facebook's success but to continue aiming at the next place the population will look for it's fix.

If you look at some of early data and research about the effect fake news spread via Facebook has had you can see Facebook has itself firmly planted in millions of American's everyday life to the extent where it's platform can distort the very perception it's citizens have of themselves. Certainly not all but healthy chunk, large enough chunk for there to be real effects.

As far as market saturation, again I'd point to Zuckerberg's heavy investment in VR and plans to invest in more emerging verticals going forward. Not to mention that Google has been at market saturation, especially in America, for many years and we do not see it's ad revenue waning in any substantial way. And Google took that ad revenue and put it into various risky forms of R&D that has now clearly lead to potentially enormous new growth verticals like Waymo.

I'm not an avid Facebook user but I get roped back in by push notifications of someone mentioning me or tagging me in a picture. In addition, about a year ago I got so tired of only seeing "mostly older people and Walmart shoppers, posting angry bumper sticker nonsense about Obama or Trump" that I searched for my favorite tech, science and political media sources on Facebook and followed them so now my feed is of more utility to me but still not ideal.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#125

Post by acchow »

ransom1538 wrote: post #85
virtuexru wrote: post #4

> Facebook’s formidable ad business, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, soaked up 99% of the online ad industry’s growth last year, according to Pivotal Research. Does that seem crazy to anyone else?

No, it is reality. Having worked in mobile ads, this saying is quite common: "You can buy ads from Google or Facebook, everything else is worthless." The long tale companies are not worth it. The amount of hassle it takes to reach out to "Glam Media" and start working out your own ad deal is a stupid waste of time. You are smarter investing in monitoring your cpi on google/fb. Edit: Glam media shutdown. https://www.r…

I also have friends running small businesses that have given up on Google as well. They say time is a limiting factor, and for them spending all their time optimizing the FB campaigns has a better ROI than using Google.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#126

Post by tboughen »

nradov wrote: post #99
losteric wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB. Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and stan…

The vast majority of Facebook users don't want to install and maintain a home server. A distributed social network will never take off if it requires users to purchase another dedicated piece of hardware.

Make it run on as a part of a distributed cloud computing service on a device that consumers are paid to install and keep. Maybe its a radiator/secondary water heater too. The payment is for reduced datacentre cooling expense.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#127

Post by ZenoArrow »

One thing I just can't get my head around... who is clicking on online ads? I click on maybe one a year, and probably less than that, and I don't think I've ever bought anything based on what I was shown in an online ad. Perhaps I'm an outlier, but considering the popularity of ad blockers I don't think my lack of engagement with online ads is that extreme.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#128

Post by BinaryIdiot »

atourgates wrote: post #113
grandalf wrote: post #88

Interestingly, I'm someone who does not click on ads, but the last 3 ads I've clicked on were on Facebook, and two resulted in purchases. I can't help it when the ads are for cool things like a $20 USB endoscope.

I work at an agency that does a decent amount of digital PPC advertising. A year ago, we'd almost entirely steer our customers away from Facebook to PPC-search advertising. Back then, the campaigns we ran on Facebook were almost entirely wasted money. But today, Facebook has really improved their ad platform. They offer pretty much unparalleled user targeting features, coupled with some clever tools like product ads…

> I work at an agency that does a decent amount of digital PPC advertising. A year ago, we'd almost entirely steer our customers away from Facebook to PPC-search advertising. Back then, the campaigns we ran on Facebook were almost entirely wasted money.

A year ago? You sure you don't mean like 3-4 years ago? 1-2 years ago Facebook advertising was also really awesome with a high ROI. Almost all the people I work with who has done, or still does marketing, has moved almost all of their money into Facebook over the past 2 years because they get a far higher ROI than any other service including Google AdWords.

I'm actually surprised to not hear about huge declines in AdWord spending (unless I missed it).

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#130

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

chollida1 wrote: post #5

Some fun Facebook facts from the earnings call/report - Facebook has a massive, $35.5 billion hoard of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. It's the third biggest S&P 500 company by this metric that isn't paying a dividend, after Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. - Facebook's headcount is now at 20,658. That's up 43 percent since last year - Average Revenue Per User Rises 23% to $4.73, Down from 4Q 2016 -…

Wait... So FB makes $1.60/mo per users through all that invasive marketing?

...Can I just give FB $5/mo to not keep their creepy profile on me? They get more money, I get not as creepily tracked.

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