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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

wsj.com

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

#161

Post by grandalf »

rconti wrote: post #152
inetknght wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've actually bought a few cool products based on FB ads where I never clicked on ads in my previous couple of decades online. Unfortunately I can't remember what I bought or explain what was different about the product or FB ad experience that caused me to click.

This is what happened for me too. I have clicked on 3 Facebook ads in the past year (and made two purchases), and prior to that I think I've clicked on perhaps three other ads in the past 15 years and made zero purchases from any of those companies.

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

#162

Post by cryoshon »

jamesmcintyre wrote: post #124
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…

>to the extent where it's platform can distort the very perception it's citizens have of themselves

yes. and that's why it has to fall.

some power can't be used responsibly, and facebook has shown that they don't give a single care about their users so long as they are producing money, as evinced by their non-consensual experimentation a couple years back.

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

#163

Post by seanmcdirmid »

protomyth wrote: post #97
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Out of curiosity, how did you put together that list? Googling seems to only bring up second-hand lists like https://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/22/big-money-the-comp... but I think I'm using the wrong terms. (That's an interesting list too -- for comparison, Apple apparently had $76.2B in 2011.)

Apple is also running up quite the debt (over $100B) in the US so the overall figure is actually lower. http://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-plans-to-sell-lots-of-...

They do that because interest rates are low and much of their cash hasn't been repatriated (taxed) to the USA.

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

#164

Post by fullshark »

teirce wrote: post #142
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 -…

Maybe I'm just a crazy millennial, but I absolutely loathe the idea of FB / Insta stories. Snapchat going under wouldn't convince me to move over -- I'd just stop using the service and move on to communicating some other way. And Stories aren't the only appeal of SNAP, though I suppose they are a large producer of revenue. HN just loves to hate SNAP, and I can't really fathom why. I can get being skeptical but every…

I'm not rooting for Snap to fail, any negative comments I made (and have seen here) were because I thought their IPO price was absurd. I think they can carve out a niche and be profitable but the expectation that they grow to the size of FB / GOOGL I just don't see it, and the IPO seemed to be priced based on that.

I also thought their stock set up with zero voting rights was crazy but that's a separate issue.

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

#165

Post by losteric »

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.

That's the point: They don't have to!

If you have protocols and software that lets someone run a social OS on their personal hardware and connected to the global network, then the walls have been broken. Any 3rd party can integrate or offer hosting.

You could also take the rabbit hole of battery improvements leading to running this on mobile devices or sending data through a distributed p2p network instead of personal HW. None of those are orthogonal to the proposal.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

mahyarm wrote: post #103
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…

It turns into email with all of it's problems. And everyone will just use a gmail equivalent or whatever else they signed up with 15 years ago anyway.

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by encoderer »

adventured wrote: post #155
jumpkickhit wrote: post #115

I'll give them credit, Facebook figured out how to monetize themselves. Versus say, Twitter, which i don't use and still don't understand how it even exists.

Interestingly, Twitter's problem is not monetization, it's cost vs scale. They managed to do $2.5 billion in sales with about 300 million monthly actives for 2016 (the 300m is wonky, I don't know what the avg was for the year etc, but they were near that anyway). If you scaled them to Facebook's size, they'd be at an equivalent $16.5 billion annually. Account for the benefits of scale that Facebook derives, and it's…

Great point. It's easy to judge twitter here, and by many different data points FB has been an exceptionally well run company, but engineers are a lot more expensive now than they were in 2010. I imagine Twitter has to pay interns today what Facebook was paying experienced engineers in 2010 (100% serious).

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

#168

Post by anth1988 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37
taurath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the growth!! Thoughts on anti-trust? If you're capturing every single part of the growth of a huge previously diversified market, whats the arguments against?

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

Short term pain for the longer term goal of not having a few conglomerates dominating the tech sector.

Worth it.

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

#170

Post by anth1988 »

brightball wrote: post #74
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

They just need one viable competitor. That's the crux of it. They need something on the other side of the "or" in "Uses Facebook or ..." They do their best to buy anybody that sneaks in there.

> They just need one viable competitor

I'm not convinced that is sufficient. Facebook at 80% isn't really any different than facebook at 99, or whatever. Google has a viable competitor in Bing, but google still dominates search to a massive degree.

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