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Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

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Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#111

Post by quickben »

unit91 wrote: post #27
loceng wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows what gaming mechanisms they could have in place to artificially inflate numbers, it could even be a third-party that somehow knows how much of an increase in user signups they need to stay on an upward course. With the level of bad acting linked to Cambridge Analytica, really anything is plausible if it's a method to maintain control via manipulating appearances, etc.

Maybe. What you're describing would mean prison for anyone involved, though, which makes me skeptical. Not saying it's definitely false (I have no way of knowing), and certainly white-collar crime happens. But that would be a very high-stakes move.

Eh, did you read what WF was found doing recently? When money matters, at executive level, it doesn't really look like they care about law, human lives (that FB memo), etc.

Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#112

Post by Piedmontese »

Rafuino wrote: post #50

Can anyone explain why their operating margin is seemingly seasonal, improving through the year? And damn, that tax rate is insanely low. Looks like they're settling into around 10% effective tax. Average across profitable companies is ~25% according to an NYU study I linked to below. Damn. www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/datasets/taxrate.xls

My uninformed guess would be the seasonality is related to holiday spending. Slides 5 and 6 show revenues by user location and Asia-pacific doesn't consistently spike in Q4, while N. America and Europe seem to follow this pattern.

Either that or accounting practices that go way above my head...

Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#113

Post by sanderjd »

idoh wrote: post #98
tomc1985 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile the worker bees pay 35-50% in income tax and other withholdings between state and federal. That pisses me off so much

Comparing personal income tax rates to corporate tax rates doesn't really make sense. At the end of the chain, corporations are always owned by human beings, who must pay tax as well (albeit possibly in the form of capital gains or taxes on dividends). Point is, if you are upset, and I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't be, then the focus should be on the difference between tax on income vs capital gains / divide…

Something I've always been curious about: if capital gain taxes (for both individuals and corporations) were set to reasonable (high) levels, would there still be a strong argument for taxing corporate profits?

Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#114

Post by dboreham »

matte_black wrote: post #86
andrewxhill wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are probably right, these numbers only account for the first 10-12 days of #deletefacebook, and those are only a few days over most of a quarter's worth of growth before them.

#DeleteFacebook is not a thing. Anyone who thinks it was going to affect Facebook doesn’t understand the fundamentals behind Facebook. It’s just some meaningless outrage porn for people to hang a hashtag off of and maybe increase their social currency. This stock is going to be back to its 190 price levels soon enough and anyone who isn’t on board is going to be left with the FOMO.

Perhaps, but I have certainly noticed a significant downturn in the level of end user engagement on Facebook in recent weeks. Almost nobody is posting these days. Plenty of ads and commercial organizations in my feed but very little organic content.

Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#116

Post by wehere1 »

matte_black wrote: post #86
andrewxhill wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are probably right, these numbers only account for the first 10-12 days of #deletefacebook, and those are only a few days over most of a quarter's worth of growth before them.

#DeleteFacebook is not a thing. Anyone who thinks it was going to affect Facebook doesn’t understand the fundamentals behind Facebook. It’s just some meaningless outrage porn for people to hang a hashtag off of and maybe increase their social currency. This stock is going to be back to its 190 price levels soon enough and anyone who isn’t on board is going to be left with the FOMO.

lmao what a loser

Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#117

Post by rokhayakebe »

samfisher83 wrote: post #60
roddux wrote: post #14

My main takeaway from this is that #deleteFacebook has been a flash in the pan-- their active user count is still increasing across all regions. Also to note, FB only pay effectively 11% tax on some 12 billion dollars worth of revenue.

Maybe most people just don't care all that much about privacy. They just want to share their picture with friends.

Maybe most people just don't care all that much about privacy

Not only that. Most people welcome the attention. The people who are fighting for privacy of their friends and family are the ones who don't get it. Friends and Family want to be out there, in the public eye, liked and commented on.

Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#118

Post by JetSpiegel »

scolson wrote: post #51
pkaye wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to give options. I think Google has given this option for their ad network... I wonder how many people subscribe to that.

To the best of my understanding, you can opt out of personalized ads with google, but not all ads. At least for the search product. For email, one can pay for their google apps tier, which doesn't have ads, but it is obviously targeted to business users, so the value prop is completely different anyway.

> To the best of my understanding, you can opt out of personalized ads with google, but not all ads. At least for the search product.

You can install uBlock Origin in all your devices.

Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#119

Post by warent »

matte_black wrote: post #94
thaumaturgy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I may have to eat some crow from an argument the other day with another HN user. Surveys and #deleteFacebook and protests and so forth seemed to indicate that people did finally start getting interested in their own privacy. But no. Somehow, even with a declining youth demographic and widespread reports of less time spent on site and the CA fiasco, they still ended up with a growth of users in all markets. I've…

We are not heading to a post-privacy world. Post-Privacy means no one can get privacy even if they want it. That has never been the case. What you are merely seeing is people are ok with the amount of data that has been collected on them. The lack of true widespread outrage means we are either at the limit or we can still collect a bit more before users get really pissed.

With things like Facebook shadow profiles, you're pretty much driven out of any sufficiently developed society if you want true privacy.

Re: Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

#120

Post by thaumaturgy »

drag0nballz wrote: post #69
thaumaturgy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I may have to eat some crow from an argument the other day with another HN user. Surveys and #deleteFacebook and protests and so forth seemed to indicate that people did finally start getting interested in their own privacy. But no. Somehow, even with a declining youth demographic and widespread reports of less time spent on site and the CA fiasco, they still ended up with a growth of users in all markets. I've…

I struggled with this initially with FB and then decided all posts would be public. Never post anything that I wouldn't want public, and not allow on my timeline posts from other people that I don't want public (I know there are limits to this). Targeted ads are fine to me. My bigger concern is the vast amount of data sharing on the back end that is easily non-anonymized and FB is a huge part of the problem.

> Targeted ads are fine to me.

This is actually the widespread attitude I imagine in a post-privacy world. It's different from people not understanding the implications of targeted ads and unknowingly accepting it. In this case, it's people that (presumably) understand this, and say, "well, that's okay."

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