Facebook loses users for the first time

Some of us saw the last wave of VR hype. It was around the same time as PalmOS, iPaq, and other handheld computing devices. It wasn't obvious to most people at the time that one of these technologies would transform the world. But visionaries saw it.

It wasn't VR then and it won't be now. VR has gained a foothold in this wave in its niches of gaming, other "entertainment", and random educational and military applications. General casual use beyond that is a pipe dream.

As for the stock price, it will come back. FB users may be down but FB now owns Instagram and WhatsApp and they haven’t started to monetize them yet.

Not to say they have genuinely been trying new technologies with AR/VR and with their stash of cash can buy any startups in AR/VR space.

If anything FB is way underpriced IMO.

I don't think DAUs would necessarily tell the full story for Facebook. Browsers still get pointed to Facebook a few times a day, but I bet the depth of engagement is a fraction of what it used to be.

>People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different?

I think the main reason for it is that most of us are just old enough to remember what facebook was before they started filling the site with ads and recommended/paid/suggested/etc posts. It was really fucking great back when you would logging and there would be literally no content/ads other than what your friend manually took the time write/post.

they gave us a taste of what a great minimalist social media platform could be and then turned monetisation/engagement to 9000.

Imagine if HN was bought by reddit and they decided to use the reddit platform (new skin only, no "old.XX...") with all the ads and everything. That's kinda what happened to facebook.

Android has more market share but iOS has the users that are most profitable. They're dominant in affluent countries (USA, UK, plenty of countries in Europe, etc) and even in countries where it isn't dominant, it's not rare for iPhones to be the phone of choice amongst the wealthy population.

Wealthier people, I imagine, are not only more likely to want to buy things, they'll also be more willing to spend their money on new things.

To get a sense on how much more valuable "valuable" consumers can be for Facebook: last quarter on average they made $60.57 dollars per user in the USA/Canada, vs just $4.89 for their users in Asia-Pacific, for example [1]. The USA and Canada are still Facebook's biggest money-making region, in spite of also being the one where they have the fewest active users [1].

I'm not sure if an immediate 25% share price dip makes sense either, given worldwide Facebook lost only 1 million DAUs, and the number of users in the USA/Canada has steadily oscillated between 195/196 million since 2020 (the loss was in "Rest of the World" the catch-all region they make the least money in.

A lot of the value of these companies is not necessarily realized value, but value derived from the expectation of continued growth at a certain pace.I can see why investors are nervous; Facebook has never lost DAUs, there's intense competition with TikTok for the young demographic, VR/AR has been a huge bet that still hasn't paid off and the controversy around Facebook weakens the value of the brand. On top of this, in spite of revenue being good, it was not what was expected and effectively advertising on the valuable iOS demographic got much harder. Maybe that warrants a 25% dip, maybe it doesn't— in any case there's definitely reasons to be nervous.

[1]: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4...