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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

wsj.com

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

#71

Post by Sir_Substance »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37
taurath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the growth!! Thoughts on anti-trust? If you're capturing every single part of the growth of a huge previously diversified market, whats the arguments against?

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

>You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

Of course you can, you just need to have standardized protocols.

You and I can use any email provider we like, your client can use exchange to talk to it's server and mine can use a version of POP from the 80's and it /doesn't matter/ because the servers talk over a standardized protocol.

Facebook and Google used to support this. There was once a time when Facebook and Google Plus both had XMPP gateways for their real time chat traffic, which meant you could send a message from Google Plus to Facebook Messenger with no problems.

They shut it down because they both have a strong incentive to push vendor lock-in. They've been so successful that you've started to forget that life could ever be otherwise.

Take a look at projects like diaspora and mastodon. There's nothing stopping Facebook from reaching out to these projects and working with them to incorporate Facebook nodes into their network using the same protocol.

But it'll never happen, because Facebook needs the corral nice and enclosed before they can start tagging you and selling you off.

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

#72

Post by jonbarker »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #43
solomatov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand, In the US monopoly is fine unless it leads to increase of price paid by consumers. EU probably has different opinion.

I was under the impression that even this was okay, it was using a monopoly position in one market to take over another market that wasn't kosher.

If I recall correctly in the US court case history they ruled one couldn't both own the means of production (ie movie studios) and the means of distribution of content (ie movie theaters). Not sure if the movie business used market power in one to take over the other, but that would be interesting to know. If you take it as an assumption that the only things that changed with the internet were 1) the volume of content increased and 2) the barrier to entry reduced, then it gets tricky. Example: the Huffington Post proved that content creators would be willing to do so for personal brand exposure instead of pay (kind of like I'm doing now as I am now realizing...). FB has created a content collection and distribution engine "employing" people who are willing to populate it for free in exchange for some non-monetary benefit. This doesn't really get FB out of the antitrust problem IMO.

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

#73

Post by sillysaurus3 »

adventured wrote: post #68
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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. How many companies in total have more than $35.5B cash/equivalents? Including Apple, for example.

Ignoring debt: Microsoft ($126b), Apple ($256b), Facebook ($35b), Berkshire Hathaway (near $100b), Cisco ($68b), Google ($92b), Oracle ($66b), Softbank (a lot), Amgen ($38b), Ford ($40b), Samsung ($73b), Johnson & Johnson ($39b), GE ($82b) There are a lot of financial entities and the like that have more cash than that of course. It's held under a different financial context than the cash that eg Apple is sitting on.…

Thank you!

Out of curiosity, how did you put together that list? Googling seems to only bring up second-hand lists like https://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/22/big-money-the-comp... but I think I'm using the wrong terms.

(That's an interesting list too -- for comparison, Apple apparently had $76.2B in 2011.)

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

#74

Post by brightball »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37
taurath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the growth!! Thoughts on anti-trust? If you're capturing every single part of the growth of a huge previously diversified market, whats the arguments against?

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

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.

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

#75

Post by btian »

rhizome wrote: post #44
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 -…

Slightly interesting aside, 3.9B for 20,658 employees is ~$188K/employee profit, which is about a 20% drop from a few years ago[1]. I'm not an economist nor statistician. 1. https://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/what-18-of-the-biggest-...

Why is that interesting?

Companies should hire more people until marginal profit per new hire is $0 to maximize profits. And that number says nothing about marginal profits.

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

#76

Post by sillysaurus3 »

Eridrus wrote: post #66
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

It doesn't necessarily need to be broken up, but if you wanted to weaken Facebook you could mandate that they made their APIs open so that social networks that wanted to spring up would be able to automatically show you content from Facebook in their UI.

That's a good one. I'm not sure how enforceable that would be, but in principle that'd be beneficial for competition.

There are a multitude of problems, like privacy concerns and the fact that FB would have no incentive to keep the API very up to date or reliable, but I wonder if something like that could work.

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

#77

Post by StevePerkins »

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 like mostly older people and Walmart shoppers, posting angry bumper sticker nonsense about Obama or Trump.

Am I just COMPLETELY out of touch? Or it is an Eternal September situation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September), where the unwashed masses are still coming on board faster than people like me are leaving?

Even if it's the latter, aren't they near a saturation point by now? Once everybody's signed up, where's the growth come from? How do you squeeze out additional monetization from a platform once there are no new members coming in, and old ones trickle away because the content is so poor?

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

#78

Post by mslate »

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…

Instagram is huge by engagement and advertising spend. They have absolutely cannibalized what Snapchat might have been.

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

#79

Post by dopamean »

maneesh wrote: post #25
dopamean wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to be snarky but is it really competition if it's just two players?

Yes. Isn't a basketball game a competition?

This is not a accurate comparison as other commenters have pointed out...

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

#80

Post by untog »

maneesh wrote: post #25
dopamean wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to be snarky but is it really competition if it's just two players?

Yes. Isn't a basketball game a competition?

> Facebook’s formidable ad business, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, soaked up 99% of the online ad industry’s growth last year

Some sports metaphors really don't work.

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