Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

nasdaq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 556 posts

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#201

Post by skinnymuch »

ethbr0 wrote: post #21
librish wrote: post #5

Apple vs ad-tech is a really interesting battle. It shows the immense power Apple has in the consumer market today, where they can affect some of the largest businesses in the US unilaterally. Meta is in a very tricky position in that unless they put up an actual paywall users don’t really have any incentive to allow tracking. But putting up a paywall introduces a lot of friction, not to mention the adverse selection…

It's much more difficult to scale price (user pays more) than it is to scale ad revenue (user sees no difference, more / more-per advertiser). At the end of the day, that's why Google and Facebook will fight tooth and nail to avoid subscription offerings. And fundamentally... Facebook's stock should be hammered. They're effectively a legacy platform attempting to milk more revenue from their existing users. They miss…

Google is up 7.5% today. Google had one of the best valuation growths in the past 2 years of mega cap companies.

It makes little to no financial sense, compared to other tech and web companies, for Facebook stock to remain down 25%. Their PE is going to be like 17.5 now.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#202

Post by Aperocky »

voidfunc wrote: post #131
intrepidsoldier wrote: post #71

The data center infrastructure that Facebook (Meta) has is probably in the top 5 in this world (behind only Amazon, Microsoft, Google). They might want to become a cloud infrastructure provider for some side money and buy themselves some time to figure out this Metaverse fantasy :) Hey, AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.

This would be an interesting but perilous pivot... trying to get into cloud infra at this point seems like an insane idea. What would even be the attraction for company to want to run on FB cloud vs one of the established players that now have a decade plus of real world operations experience from running 3rd party customer workloads? If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Va…

> If I am Zuck

All of these growth idea sounds incredibly boring. More likely? Maybe, but incredibly boring. Meanwhile meta is at least sounds pretty interesting.

There need to be some fun for him to just not permanently retire on his Hawaiian Island.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#203

Post by oliv__ »

poisonborz wrote: post #157
voidfunc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be an interesting but perilous pivot... trying to get into cloud infra at this point seems like an insane idea. What would even be the attraction for company to want to run on FB cloud vs one of the established players that now have a decade plus of real world operations experience from running 3rd party customer workloads? If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Va…

> figuring out how to buy Valve He would step in a long queue, and would get the same answer everyone in front of him: Gaben wouldn't let it slip out even from his cold dead hands.

> "Gaben wouldn't let it slip out even from his cold dead hands"

Maybe that's an idea

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#204

Post by lokalfarm »

acdha wrote: post #147
paulryanrogers wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What phone monopoly did Apple disrupt? Nokia? Symbian? Java mobile? Palm? Blackberry?

The phone carriers. They charged a fortune for data, restricted useful features on your phone (I remember one model which wouldn't play non-DRMed music because they wanted to boost their revenue), and things like mobile apps were held back by the way the carriers would look at your finances and decide how much to charge just for the privilege of being listed. When Qualcomm was getting started with BREW we looked into…

How did Apple change any of this? (Genuine question - I am not well versed in cellular network technologies or their history, but I would love to read about how Apple led to improvements in the US infrastructure.)

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#205

Post by dymk »

civilized wrote: post #189
jmknoll wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you on this. I received a Quest as a Christmas gift and basically went from 0 to 100 on VR and the Metaverse. It finally makes sense to me. Like you say, there are some issues with the tech, but they’ll be resolved in time, and it’s clear that this is the future of gaming at least, and maybe much of social media/virtual interaction.

For the sake of argument let's take you folks' word that it's the future of gaming (for the subset that can tolerate and enjoy the headsets). How much money is in that? I don't believe for a moment that it'll extend into work interactions. Maybe family visiting type experiences, again for the subset that can enjoy the headset setup.

Facebook loses about $150 per Quest 2 sold (basing this off of what an engineer who worked on it told me). Either way, they're not making money off the hardware.

They plan on making it up via game sales in the Oculus Rift Store, and services. Same as what Sony did with the PS4 (which was quite successful). I see "Quest Season Passes" in VR's future.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#206

Post by kodemager »

librish wrote: post #5

Apple vs ad-tech is a really interesting battle. It shows the immense power Apple has in the consumer market today, where they can affect some of the largest businesses in the US unilaterally. Meta is in a very tricky position in that unless they put up an actual paywall users don’t really have any incentive to allow tracking. But putting up a paywall introduces a lot of friction, not to mention the adverse selection…

It’s anecdotal but the adds I get on DuckDuckGo by it matching what I search for tend to be better than the targeted adds I get on Google or Facebook which are typically advertisements for things that I have just bought.

Like when I search for hiking shoes, that’s when you should advertise, now for the next two months. I’m not going to buy a second pair for another 20 years after all, and if it’s to reassure me I made the right purchases then they shouldn’t be for variating brands.

But I mean, you’re probably right, why else would various sales decision spend so much money on advertisement companies?

I think the “pay with your privacy” model is probably coming to an end though. At least here in the EU that seems to be the long term plan, and I think Apple might agree with me.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#207

Post by jsw97 »

dmurray wrote: post #96
gzer0 wrote: post #59

Here are the results that caused this: - Earnings per share: $3.67 vs $3.84 expected - Revenue: $33.67 billion vs $33.4 billion expected Facebook also missed estimates with user numbers. - Daily Active Users (DAUs): 1.93 billion vs 1.95 billion expected - Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 2.91 billion vs 2.95 billion expected - Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $11.57 vs $11.38 expected Future guidance was the biggest miss…

It's not really plausible that the market can predict Facebook's earnings to within 5% and that such a small miss would cause a rational investor to value Facebook 20% lower. This seems more like a symptom of the market being generally skittish, with a small side of "expected" earnings actually being a low-biased estimate, so it's more like a 10% miss.

Seemingly narrow misses often cause large declines. The reason is that management has a lot of ways to guide analysts to reasonable numbers. Like it or not, companies also have ways of stretching to make it work. If the company can’t meet those numbers, even after all of that communication, with all the means available to them, well that’s a bad sign.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#208

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

skinnymuch wrote: post #149
dekhn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the world? ali baba would like to have a word

True, but Alibaba does do cloud. Facebook and Tencent are far and away the biggest web companies that don’t do some sort of B2B cloud offering.

https://cloud.tencent.com ?

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#209

Post by lvl100 »

voidfunc wrote: post #131
intrepidsoldier wrote: post #71

The data center infrastructure that Facebook (Meta) has is probably in the top 5 in this world (behind only Amazon, Microsoft, Google). They might want to become a cloud infrastructure provider for some side money and buy themselves some time to figure out this Metaverse fantasy :) Hey, AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.

This would be an interesting but perilous pivot... trying to get into cloud infra at this point seems like an insane idea. What would even be the attraction for company to want to run on FB cloud vs one of the established players that now have a decade plus of real world operations experience from running 3rd party customer workloads? If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Va…

Is it really insane? Facebook knows how to optimize pytorch and ML applications more than anyone. They can sell that on the market.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#210

Post by kergonath »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #163
paulpauper wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t have a very diversified revenue stream despite trying various side businesses. Google and Microsoft have had the same business model forever .

> Google and Microsoft have had the same business model forever . Microsoft has Xbox, Office, Azure, etc. Google has Android, Google Workplace, GCP, etc. When you diversify your income streams you add more. It doesn't mean you get rid of your breadwinner. Facebook's main model seems to becoming illegal and/or not viable via a tech perspective.

> Google has Android, Google Workplace, GCP, etc.

Alphabet is more than 80% advertising: https://searchengineland.com/google-q4-2021-earnings-379735 . They are good at skewing how they are perceived but they are very close to being a one-business company. Not defending Facebook, but Google is not much better.

Post reply on HN