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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

#221

Post by greggman »

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 don't know if you're out of touch and I don't believe my usage is typical but I get lots out of facebook.

First of, messenger is my most common form of communication with friends and family. I use both the messenger app and messenger.com

The next biggest concrete use is event planning. Pretty much all my friends use facebook events to plan their events so I get invited to the event on facebook. I probably wouldn't not get invited otherwise. That's not because my friends aren't thoughtful, rather it's because it's the path of least resistance. Create an event, look at your friend list, add everyone you hope will come, done. Also if it's an open event it makes it easier for friends to add friends.

I also found out about tons of activities. If a friend is going to or has shown interest in an event facebook will often show that to me so I found out about several activities I wouldn't have attended otherwise.

Friends also directly accounts events they're promoting so I find out about those. A simple example, the Tokyo Indies (indie gamedev) meetup is announced on facebook (among other places but I don't use those other places)

Then, even if I were to ignore all my friends my mother and my sister post semi-regular updates.

A few things that help though

1. I've aggressively unfollowed tons of people. Anyone I don't really care about. Anyone I probably won't see again in my life. Anyone who posts too much (except my sister). Anyone who posts too much political stuff (just don't want to frustration). Anyone who used to be kind of part of life but no longer really is.

2. If FB shows me something I don't want to see I always tell it "hide post", "show me less of this". Their algos suck unfortunately but it helps a little

3. I'm running FBPurity to filter out lots of inane posts. Any "so-and-so commented on" or "so-and-so replied to a post" or "so-and-so was mentioned in a comment" and lots of others.

I will say the more FB tries to tempt me to interact the more I think I'll eventually have to quit. The latest is the popups for comments. I get that it would be useful for people but it's just such a distraction for me I want it off.

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

#222

Post by robryan »

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?

I am surprised that the Taboola style related articles ads that appear below pretty much anything news like online these days aren't a bigger growth area.

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

#223

Post by sidcool »

I have met very very few people who actually like Facebook, and still it continues to make impressive strides, technologically and financially. May be I am living in a filter bubble where no one likes Facebook and there's a world somewhere where people are all the time hooked on FB, Instagram and WhatsApp.

P.S. I use WhatsApp and like it, so it makes me minor hypocrite.

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

#224

Post by stepanhruda »

ptr_void wrote: post #184
brandnewlow wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook lets over a million companies get their products in front of people who are inclined to purchase them. When those Facebook users do in fact click and make purchases it is often (not always) a profitable exchange for the companies advertising. Those companies take the revenue from the sales and use it to pay people to do other work for them. Wherever it is you work, they probably advertise on Facebook. Creati…

If not with Facebook and Alphabet, there would still be most of those companies selling their products, with other means or site. There's not much that Facebook adds other than number of people it has using their site during their off times. If people needed to buy things, they could have easily looked it up on other sites or real places. There are many companies that do much more important things, produces more usef…

Ah yes, no need for internet at all. We could already send messages via other means before it.

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

#225

Post by 1024core »

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…

> Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now.

It's coming. Every time I open the FB app, I see mainly "Sponsored" items or "Suggested" items (most of them videos) and fewer and fewer updates from friends. As a result, my usage of FB has declined by about 80% in the past month or two, and it's only going to get worse. My wife recently uninstalled the app.

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

#226

Post by runeks »

jdhn wrote: post #149
teirce wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another crazy millennial here. I don't have an Instagram either, and frankly I don't want one. As for why HN hates Snap, I'm not exactly sure. Is it because the average user on HN is older and isn't targeted by Snap? Maybe it's seen as a frivolous plaything? No matter what the reason, there's definitely a lot of hate for Snap on this site.

> As for why HN hates Snap, I'm not exactly sure.

Why must it be hate? Couldn't it just be, simply, that we're not that interested in yet another chat application? To me, Snap is a slightly modified ICQ client. Fine, but not very interesting.

Real progress would be some sort of open standard, so who you're speaking with isn't determined by which company's chat server you connect to. But then again email has supported this for several decades already, so maybe the demand isn't there.

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

#227

Post by bitmapbrother »

losteric wrote: post #52
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.

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…

>I know Google's ad revenue is getting eaten by FB

No it's not.

>For the first three months of this year, Alphabet reported just over $26 billion in revenue, up 21 percent from the same period last year. Without the EU fine, it would have notched $6.87 billion in operating income, up around 15 percent from the second quarter of 2016.

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

#228

Post by lavezzi »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #220
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 -…

> Monthly Active Users 2.0 Billion Just as a reminder of how insane this is, the population of the entire world is 7.5 billion.

Users not people, right?

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

#229

Post by deepGem »

fullshark wrote: post #164
teirce wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zero voting rights make a lot of sense for the founders in today's world of activist investors. Caveat, the founders act in good faith.
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