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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

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

#281

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

Trundle wrote: post #240
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you aware that facebook is very popular in the developing world? It basically is the internet for large amounts of SEA users. If that $5/month isn't sizeable to you then chances are that they make a shitload more off of your demographic than $1.60.

Likely so, but there's two facts to consider:

I offered to pay 3x the average rate to account for some of that. I think that moves me into covering the average spread across the US and Western Europe (about a third of their active users). Now, I'm still probably one of the more valuable people, but it would be the average cost if all the revenue was spread across people who could afford that cost.

Facebook already claims they don't use a profile to market to me. (It took some digging, but you can delete your tracking profile conclusions and turn off a lot of things.) Which means (assuming they're honest), I'm probably not a high value user because they can't target me for high value ads. This would just be giving them an alternative revenue stream to compensate for that. (So a strict improvement for Facebook.)

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

#282

Post by 1024core »

philh wrote: post #277
1024core wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It's coming. I take it you plan to short the stock, to take advantage of what you know that the market doesn't?

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

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

#283

Post by philh »

1024core wrote: post #282
philh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's coming. I take it you plan to short the stock, to take advantage of what you know that the market doesn't?

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

I don't suggest putting in enough money to risk insolvency. If you're confident that the decline will happen in, say, five years, then I expect you could buy a few put options and make some healthy profit.

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

#284

Post by shostack »

fma wrote: post #59
solomatov wrote: post #13

Interesting thing is that GOOG's results which were released several days ago weren't so stellar. It's good to see real competition in advertisement market.

Not surprised. My wife started a local franchise that provides a service and I've been doing the Internet marketing. I ran local ads on Google...lots of clicks and cost lots of money...but no one came in saying they were referred by Google. Other owners I've talked to told me to use Facebook, it's more effective.

Respectfully without knowing your background, I hear this sort of anecdotal story a lot. Often times it is from people who ran a tiny amount of spend, didn't have their account properly setup, didn't have solid conversion tracking setting for the areas that matter, and then arrived at the conclusion that it failed because it "drove lots of clicks and cost lots of money" without any mention of whether they reached statistical significance for testing conversion performance, or any of those other things I mentioned. Waiting for people to come in saying they were referred by Google is just a really poor way to go about measuring performance of local advertising on Google with things like the ability to upload offline conversions, promoting coupons with unique codes, click-to-call ads, etc.

More often than not I've found the issue is with the advertiser, not Google. And I'm saying this as someone who has done paid search across many verticals, many size clients, and helped lead the paid search group at a top search agency.

My take on the reason for this is Google and FB make a genuine effort to make it easy for mom and pop businesses to advertise with them. However they also tend to push them towards things that maximize their revenue and margins in the process (as one might expect) even if it wasn't necessarily in the best interest of the advertiser.

For example, when you click to create a new campaign, Google has "Search Network with Display Select" as the first option, and they say "best opportunity to reach the most customers." That is easily the most salesy wording in that entire list. And inexperienced advertisers might think it was the right choice. But it is not. I can't think of a single experienced advertiser I know who would ever mix search and display network traffic. I just can't think of any real reason that could potentially offset the downsides of doing so. But you'd be hard pressed to figure that out just by taking their UI and docs and recommendations at face value.

There is a reason that an entire media career path has sprung up around managing search and display, and that's because it is highly technical, extremely complex, and changing at a breathtaking pace--much like engineering.

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

#285

Post by protomyth »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #163
protomyth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but that doesn't really change the fact that their money in the bank needs to be considered partially encumbered.

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

#286

Post by MarkMc »

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…

Check out this graph of monthly active users: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/facebook-earnings-q2-2017/

Over the past two years, the number of users has grown by around 30%. Rich areas like US and Europe have only grown 13%. So if revenue per user was static then I would expect Facebook's total revenue growth to be around 20%. Instead revenue has grown more than 100%, which suggests that Facebook is extracting much more $ per user.

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

#287

Post by brightball »

anth1988 wrote: post #170
brightball wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't disagree, but it's more like having a viable alternative in the background that gets relatively popular and stable.

As long as it's there, then if there's every a major ball drop on Facebook's part that makes a lot of people want to switch to something else they'll have somewhere to go. When people moved to Facebook from MySpace it was driven by a lot of issues with MySpace that pushed people away.

Something like this past year's election with all of the controversy over how the trending news was handled could have promoted a movement of "Enough, I'm done. Going to X." Enough "me too's" and you start a trend.

A lot of that happened with Instagram. People wanted a place they could go free of political rants and Instagram largely provided that...and Facebook owns them.

You've seen a lot of "quitting Facebook" trends this year and I believe that it's largely a result of lack of a viable alternative.

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

#288

Post by awkwarddaturtle »

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 -…

> - 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.

It's "massive" but compared to AAPL's $250 billion in cash, FB's cash it is still fairly small.

> Facebook and Google combine to account for up to 99% of advertising growth.

They both pretty much dominate the search/video/social media space.

What is most astounding to me is that every nation doesn't develop their own google/FB. I still find it incredible that most of europe is dominated by google and facebook. Even india.

I respect what FB and GOOGL have done, but their "tech" isn't hard to replicate. With regulation and government authority, countries like germany, india, france, etc can develop their own FB and GOOGL.

China, Russia, Japan, Korea, etc are smart in developing their own local tech/social media/etc industries. I'm so astounded that germany, france, india, etc have completely ceded their territories to google/FB/etc.

I can understand britain/canada/australia ceding control to the US since we are anglo nations with similar culture, language and historical roots. But why don't spanish speaking countries, german speaking countries, french speaking countries, etc have their own "google/FB"?

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

#289

Post by losteric »

skybrian wrote: post #266
losteric wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think RSS is a closer analogy than email, but anyway... it could be argued those rules don't really exist today. Good snaps get stored and shared forever, everyone knows to screenshot dumb posts on FB, and there are plenty of twitter archival tools. Youtube's DRM and takedowns work OK against film pirates, but it's still easy to find many movies and redistributed personal content online. Though I'd be curious what…

Despite the exceptions and workarounds, the defaults matter for the user experience and social dynamics of an online forum. Even on Hacker News, the various moderation features and things like being able to edit your post after publishing make a difference to how the community works. It's not only what you can get away with but also what people feel like they have a right to do. An interesting proof of concept might…

I think those features are compatible with this model - RSS handles edited content just fine (clients can store the old content, but there is a canonical "latest" version).

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

#290

Post by losteric »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #227
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…

>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.

The market is growing, of course both FB and Google will keep growing for a bit - but FB's 39% (and growing) share is nothing to sneeze at. FB is a cancerous walled garden that is increasingly hostile to search engines.
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