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

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

#351

Post by GekkePrutser »

chaostheory wrote: post #333
GekkePrutser wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about hardware really. The hardware is just to sell the service in the best way possible. They had to make it. Because there was no good affordable standalone headset so far. The metaverse idea is all about the platform/service. I'm a big VR fan and even I'm not sure whether the metaverse will take off. But without hardware like the quest 2 it wouldn't have a chance.

The service is key, but I somehow doubt they will open their platform to 3rd party hardware like Valve. imo The hardware is just as important.

I think they will restrict it at first, to control the user experience. In the starting phase it'll be crucial to avoid bad reviews due to substandard hardware. Google did exactly this with their cardboard headset. People lost interest in VR because they watched a rollercoaster vid on a crappy cardboard setup and thought they had seen it all. All these $5 eBay headsets flooding the world didn't promote VR at all. They just imprinted the idea "VR is just a gimmick" in people's minds. As a VR enthusiast I still need to explain the difference between 3DOF and real interactive 6DOF all the time. It took a long time to build interest in real 6DOF VR back up.

But I think once (or, if) the metaverse has proven its value to the consumer their goal is to be the leading platform and opening it up would make sense there, it would be key to maximising marketshare. Especially as they're not even making money on the hardware, it's being sold at a loss. That'll change too once the platform proves itself but still I don't think they expect it to be a major money maker.

Zuckerberg mentioned in his keynote that they want to go for a different business model. They want to sell the platform and enable creators to sell their designs, taking a cut in the Apple store way. And they can still take a cut on third party hardware by licensing. Which means revenue without even having to bother manufacturing anything.

I think hardware to Meta will be what hardware is to Microsoft. Setting a good baseline standard, promoting new designs and usecases (e.g. the surface pro convertible) and directing the market. But not being the sole vendor.

But I may be wrong of course. It'll be interesting times ahead!

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

#352

Post by redwood »

virtuallynathan wrote: post #247
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.

Based on my calculations, Facebook has more DC space/power than Google/Amazon/Microsoft. They have around 40 million sq ft of DC space, and likely ~5GW of power. They have 48 buildings in 18 locations, with 47 more under construction. AWS Data centers are fairly small, ~180,000 sq ft or so generally, us-east-2 is about 900,000 sq ft. us-east-1 perhaps 8 million sq ft. Google likely has more network capacity, but FB i…

I don't see how that could possibly be true. AWS must be much bigger than Facebook

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

#353

Post by noelsusman »

matt_wilson_206 wrote: post #316
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My feed is full of shit I don’t want I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two. There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you'…

Finally, someone with a similar Facebook experience to my own. I've been reading threads about how horrific the FB feed is for years, but my own is literally 99% updates from friends I don't get to see, and an occasional ad (that is interesting more often than not). Glad to know I'm not completely alone!

I just glanced at mine and it's like 90% people I used to know posting pictures of their kids. The rest is stuff like my buddy's mom posting a recipe for 10 minute Roti.

Overall not bad to be honest. Still not much I'm actually interested in but far from cancerous.

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

#354

Post by 8note »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #299
IgorPartola wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads. Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from pe…

> My feed is full of shit I don’t want I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two. There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you'…

Ive done that to the point where it frequently says "there's nothing to show here" instead of a feed. I know people I'm interested in hearing from are posting things, but Facebook will never decide to show them to me, regardless of my settings

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

#355

Post by colinmhayes »

cwkoss wrote: post #341
omot wrote: post #169

This is from Mark Zuckerberg's post. I think it's a decent explanation of their performance. Historically Facebook always made these longer-term bets and they've typically paid off. "Before I get to that, I want to briefly touch on our Q4 results, which I know Sheryl and Dave are going to go deeper on. I'm proud of the work our teams did here. We shipped products, our community continued to grow, and businesses of al…

Stories "paid off"? Are there ads in them? Are they popular with other people? Very minimally utilized in my social circle, I see maybe 1 suggested story per month, maybe click through 2-4 a year, watch 10 seconds of bland content by someone I haven't talked to in years, then close the tab wondering why I thought the it was going to be interesting this time.

Zuck is worried Facebook is becoming the lame social network for old people, probably because it is. It's hard to lose that label once they've got it. He even says here that they're willing to sacrifice short term engagement for more youth engagement. Stories is widely used among the youth making it incredibly valuable.

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

#356

Post by misiti3780 »

chaostheory wrote: post #329
misiti3780 wrote: post #283

Google / Google+ === Facebook/Metaverse. They can change their name all they want, they are slowing turning into the AOL of our decade. I'm willing to take bets on where this is all going. I own an Oculus - it sucks. The founder of Oculus admits it sucks. Instagram sucks more than it did last year. I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole. Eventually FB will lose because their entire b…

> I own an Oculus - it sucks. Why? Which model? > I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole. Don't you need a Facebook account for Oculus?

Quest 2

Yes, it is required. I liked it to my brother's account.

It sucks for a few different reasons.

1. It's very uncomfortable when you sweat, which you do for any of the active sports games. The Oculus falls off your head and causes you to break out.

2. If you have glasses but cant wear contacts (my issue) it's a lot harder to use.

3. Lack of interesting games. I like golf, the golf game is actually cool, one free course with the option of paying for 1 other course, so 2 total courses.

The current version is no where people are going to spend a lot of time in the near future.

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

#357

Post by misiti3780 »

buzzert wrote: post #298
misiti3780 wrote: post #283

Google / Google+ === Facebook/Metaverse. They can change their name all they want, they are slowing turning into the AOL of our decade. I'm willing to take bets on where this is all going. I own an Oculus - it sucks. The founder of Oculus admits it sucks. Instagram sucks more than it did last year. I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole. Eventually FB will lose because their entire b…

> The founder of Oculus admits it sucks. Palmer Luckey? I believe you, but I was wondering if you had a quote/reference for that.

https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1487335783522390016

I will admit it's possible I'm putting words in his mouth.

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

#358

Post by colinmhayes »

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.

The real problem is the bad guidance, not earnings. Theyre guiding q1 revenue to be 10% below Wall Street expectations.

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

#359

Post by prostoalex »

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.

2021 was a record year for fund inflows.

Stimulus checks combined with broad accessibility of trading platforms (Robinhood, etc.) led to fund inflows growing 71% https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/global-markets-etf-gr...

And that's just ETF inflows aside from mutual funds and options markets.

The top recipients, according to the article linked above, were VOO, VTI and SPY. All follow an index that's market-cap-weighed, benefiting top 10 holdings more than the rest of the market.

The explanation I've seen floated is retail investors treating VOO and VTI as their savings account (for the lack of any decent yield opportunities). That money is eventually going to be withdrawn and spent, punishing those top 10 holdings excessively compared to the rest of the market.

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

#360

Post by acdha »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #324
acdha wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Balckberry, Treo, AIM, XMPP, and Windows Mobile blazed the trails. Apple's role in ramping up data usage likely helped, though I suspect much of that change would have happened eventually regardless.

> Balckberry, Treo, AIM, XMPP, and Windows Mobile

2 of those aren't phones, did you mean something else?

On the other three, that's kind of like saying that the IBM Selectric blazed the trail for the PC — not wrong, but minimizing how much room there was still to go. If you used a Blackberry, it was good at message, tolerable for email, and bad at everything else. The Treos had some nice ideas but were agonizing slow, PalmOS was unstable, the software selection was limited, and the UI was … uninspired. Windows Mobile was at least stable but held back by mediocre hardware, and it had the lowest-common denominator problem that developers had to deal with the same OS running on a wide range of hardware and thus apps weren't usually tailored to work with the hardware.

The major trailblazing things added by the iPhone were the first touchscreen UI which was often better than a desktop UI — the Palm-style touchscreens with a stylus were much clumsier – and a desktop-grade web browser. Yes, other devices had mobile browsers earlier but they had significant compatibility issues and the UIs were uniformly clumsy — I briefly had a work Blackberry which was one of the last non-Android devices they made and despite coming out later, it was worse that an iPhone 1 in every way except messaging, and that's only if you excluded the App Store because that wasn't in the first release.

One of the big things which people underestimated was how much bigger the iPhone screen felt: when you were used to having something that size which was half controls, the iPhone had significantly more usable space (at higher quality than the displays common on many phones at the time, too) and the touchscreen keyboard could adapt to the context so it was much easier to use than the various systems like A9 which some phone manufacturers had invented. One nice side-effect of this is that it made localization better since the manufacturer didn't need to ship different hardware for different languages and multilingual users could just switch.

The final big thing was that breaking the carrier roadblock wasn't just about cheaper data. It also meant that the carriers didn't disable features based on marketing plans or try to force you to use some terrible app or services they got a kickback on (iOS 1 didn't support other apps but the bundled ones were quite good compared to the field and the App Store shipped shortly afterwards, which finally unleashed the mobile development industry which had been held back by the carriers).

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