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Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
- ardy42 8y ago> Facebook’s daily to monthly user ratio, or stickiness, held firm at 66 percent where it’s stayed for years, showing those still on Facebook aren’t using it much less. What are the precise definitions of daily and monthly active users? To be a daily user, do you literally have to use Facebook every day for a month?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rdiddly 8y agoNo, it's just the number of users who used it that day, no matter what each of them did on previous or subsequent days.
- rock_hard 8y agoThe number shared though is usually a weekly or monthly average. Otherwise it be easy to game
- mbell 8y agoI am curious what 'used' means. e.g. Does logging into a third party service via facebook login count as 'used' since you technically hit their servers?
- chillacy 8y agoNo, if it were that tangential, investors wouldn't be reporting it and using it to make buying / selling decisions.
- mbell 8y agoI think you overestimate how deep investors dig. I did find this from a few years ago which contains a bunch of rather fuzzy language: https://www.adweek.com/digital/monthly-active-users-definition-revised/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/monthly-active-users-definiti... My interpretation of that would be that if, prior to that change, you logged to spotify with facebook and didn't uncheck the 'share' button you would have been counted, but after you would not have been. I do find it rather curious that they simply count any user that logs in and 'visited' facebook. i.e. that no 'actions' need to take place or there isn't any metric for time on site required. Seems rather easy to game that number by just not going after bot accounts.
- chillacy 8y agoTrue, numbers can be gamed. But at the end of the day there's one number that matters: people click ads and buy products -> companies buy ads and pay fees. And it's been going up steadily for the past decade. If you strongly believe that you've found an inefficiency in the market please feel free to short FB.
- jedberg 8y agoDaily active users is the number of unique people who showed up in a single 24 hour period. Monthly active users is the number of unique people who showed up at least once that month. To get the ratio of DAU to MAU, you can either take the average DAU for each day of the month, and then compare that to the MAU, or you can take the DAU to MAU ratio for each day and then average that. They'll both come out about the same (doing it the second way smoothes it out just a bit more because of the loss of precision which makes the month to month comparisons or quarter to quarter a little smoother).
- tejaswiy 8y agoIs there something that tracks the number of minutes a daily active user spends on the site? I still login to facebook but I barely post on it anymore and spend way less time than I used to a couple of years ago.
- cwkoss 8y agoThey certainly track it, so it may be telling that they are not reporting the trend in this measure.
- chollida1 8y agoPre: - still 30% off highs Numbers: - 4Q EPS $2.38, Est. $2.18 - 4Q Rev. $16.91B, Est. $16.39B - 4Q Mobile Ad Rev. as % Ad Rev. 93% - Mobile represents 93% of ad revenue. Mark doesn't get enough credit for his big switch to mobile, - Cost of revenue up 74 percent year over year - Operating costs went up by 60%, Note this is more than their growth rate, really the only concerning thing from a good quarter - Annual capex is $13.9 billion, pretty close to what Microsoft spends - CFO is talking about phasing out Facebook only numbers and just disclosing total numbers(Insta, WhatsApp, and FB rolled into one) - Users: - 4Q MAU 2.32B, Est. 2.32B - 4Q DAU 1.52B, Est. 1.51B - DAU up in Europe for first time in 2-3 quarters, Flat in North America - instagram stories has 500M DAU Misc: - Headcount was 35,587 at year end. Increase of 42% for the year!! - shares back up to Oct levels, - turns out the markets like companies who can mint money and both users and advertisers just don't care at all about facebooks scandals - https://investor.fb.com/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4/Q4-2018-Earnings-Presentation.pdf https://investor.fb.com/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4/Q4-2018... - more after hours trading than alot of stocks get during the entire day - Zuckerberg saying that messaging growing faster than any other area. It will become more central to the social experience on Facebook's apps.
- LocalPCGuy 8y agoOperating costs going up makes sense if FB is hiring in order to attempt to address many of the issues that were highlighted throughout the year. I'd venture to say they will continue to grow this year, I think I just heard them mention that during the call.
- panabee 8y agothanks for this and other breakdowns. what was the primary driver for operating costs rising so much?
- adpirz 8y agoIt’s hard not to look at this performance and take away from it that most people really don’t care about privacy. As upsetting as the thought may be to some, Mark’s hypothesis that privacy is no longer a social norm we value seems to be proven more and more right. Despite all the scandals and hearings, their DAU are more than the population of the largest countries on Earth. Short of serious legislation, what slows them down? Negative press seems to be nothing but pebbles thrown at steamroller...
- echevil 8y agoWell, though privacy is kind of imprtant to most people, what alternatives do people have (other than stop using all social media?) I don't think the problem of Facebook is unique to them at all - data leak, fake news, whatever - they are instrinsically hard problem to solve, and frankly I don't think there would be lot of companies doing much better.
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- IshKebab 8y agoI don't think that's true. People clearly care about privacy otherwise we wouldn't have curtains and account access controls etc. They just aren't worried enough about Facebook violating their privacy enough to stop using it. Frankly for most people that is the right decision. Facebook has done much less immoral stuff than the media would have you believe. Even the Cambridge Analytica type stuff (i.e. the obvious potential for abuse of the Friends API) was totally public at the time but nobody cared.
- cm2012 8y agoSince there's no real life downside to FB using your data to show you more relevant ads, people are making the rational trade-off. Privacy issues with FB are ideology based in nature.
- Barrin92 8y agoThere is research being done on targeted advertisement, and apart from the obvious effect of altering your behaviour and your attention, there has been research shown that it can go as far as changing self-perception.[1] So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good. There is no reason to believe any deliberation on part of consumers here is rational. The relationship between self harm and social media usage in adolescents are well documented as well. So it is quite ironic to assert that being concerned about facebook's behaviour is 'ideological', when in fact advocates seem to willfully ignore evidence that suggests that we're playing dice with people's psychology here. [1]https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more-likely-to-buy-they-can-change-how-you-think-about-yourself https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more...
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoUntil this metric materially changes for the negative, nothing else with Facebook will change.
- nodesocket 8y agoJust continues to show, privacy issues don't matter to companies because it doesn't affect profitability and the stock price. Even with barrage of constant #deletefb and "I deleted my facebook" posts, it didn't actually matter. Essentially no change to daily active users and advertising revenue.
- yumraj 8y agoYes, that is why you need regulation to drive change.
- chillacy 8y agoPeople haven't traditionally cared about privacy when it comes time to US elections either, it's definitely not a single-issue voter issue like abortion, gun ownership, welfare, etc. So I propose a dictatorship of HN commenters ;)
- wilkskyes 8y agoThe change is already happening: People don't care about privacy that much anymore. Any regulation introduced, would be to stop this change. But it will never work, you can't make people care about privacy through regulations.
- nzbahz 8y agoSo your point is that people must care about it, and if they don't it doesn't matter because we'll take away Facebook anyway?
- nerdface 8y agoThe whole market is up due to today's announcement of interest rates remaining the same, not any unique announcement to Facebook.
- Panini_Jones 8y ago.. Are you serious?
- nerdface 8y agoDo you not look at facts backed by data? The whole market is up as of today. Heck, read the news: https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-stocks-waver-ahead-of-the-fed-11548839844 https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-stocks-waver-ahead-of-th... The stock increase is not unique to Facebook today. ALL major tech stocks are up today.
- dymk 8y agoThe NYSE composite index is up by 1%. DOW by 2%. NASDAQ by 2%. Facebook is up 4% in-hours, and 12% in after-hours trading. Do you look at facts backed by data? FB is beating the market with a whip.
- seattle_spring 8y ago> Heck, read the news Will do! https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/facebook-q4-2018-earnings-2019-1-1027910539 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/facebook-q4-... Honest question: Why are you so extremely passionate about this?
- jedberg 8y agoYou could potentially explain the normal trading hours bump because of that, but the after hours is definitely on the earnings news.
- porpoisely 8y agoLook at the after hours volume and price movement. It's definitely an earnings related move. https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/after-hours https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/after-hours
- ProfessorLayton 8y agoWhile a good quarter for FB despite all the scandals, reporters have pointed out that there's potentially a lot of lag between Ad spend and user growth: https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1090726978271903744 https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1090726978271903744
- chillacy 8y agoBut then later in the thread: https://twitter.com/EvanMcPhee/status/1090727957725818881 https://twitter.com/EvanMcPhee/status/1090727957725818881 https://twitter.com/HenryInnis/status/1090730656009617408 https://twitter.com/HenryInnis/status/1090730656009617408 Past success no guarantee of future returns of course.
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- deegles 8y agoI’m growing more and more convinced that the only real way for employees to enact real change at their company is for them to become a significant, united group of shareholders and force changes from the top. Unions sure as hell aren’t being encouraged. Unfortunately this would not work in Facebook since Zuck still has a controlling interest but it might work for others. Does that make sense?
- jalgos_eminator 8y agoI'm afraid that this is just how capitalism works. People have to vote with their dollars, and right now they are voting for Facebook.
- trophycase 8y agoThey aren't even voting for Facebook with their dollars. FB/Insta is something they use for free and they are "way too smart" to be affected by advertising because they "see ads all the time and don't want to run out and buy the product"
- pavlov 8y agoFacebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world. Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call: "There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily." That’s a lot more monthly active users than Snapchat has — for a part of the app which everyone automatically assumes to be a flop. That’s what global 2.3 billion users looks like: your local anecdata doesn’t tell anything.
- jcfrei 8y agoI wonder, will this large part of Facebook users that still uses the platform (and Watch) eventually migrate to Instagram as well (as most of North America and Europe appear to have done?). Or does the standard Facebook actually better cater to a large part of the world's population than Instagram?
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- eanzenberg 8y agoI was super impressed on the recommendations from FB watch where I just kept it auto-playing the next and the next video. Their tech isn't as good, their videos are choppier than youtube and netflix, but their recommendations were insanely good.
- gnahckire 8y agoOoh that's interesting. I'm not surprised by how great their recommendations are; Facebook's AI research team is pretty top notch. I wonder what they're doing for recommendations.
- saberience 8y ago
- djsumdog 8y agoFacebook is the only way a lot of people have to contact one another. I feel like only celebrities deleted FB accounts during the whole #DeleteFacebook thing. Furthermore, I think a lot of that campaign (and be honest, it was not organic. It was a purposeful campaign by news and media giants in an attempt to show they still dominated the minds of people in the world) was a battle of the old rich vs the nouveau riche as Gatsby would say. I wrote more about this last year, specifically focusing on Zuckerberg's rumors of eyeing the presidency: https://fightthefuture.org/article/facebook-politics-and-orwells-24-7-hate/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/facebook-politics-and-orw...
- mjfl 8y ago> I feel like only celebrities deleted FB accounts during the whole #DeleteFacebook thing. and after they deleted facebook, they went on their Instagrams.
- kerng 8y agoDeleting Facebook isnt enough to get traction on the privacy front. They now will turn instagram and WhatsApp into those invasive ad machines.
- emptyfile 8y agoThere was a "#DeleteFacebook thing" this year? I'm assuming the hashtag is from Twitter which is insanely funny to me, since I see no difference between all of these social networks. BTW outside of USA and a few west european countries people barely know what Twitter is. In any case I feel that all this focus on Facebook makes people forget that Instagram is far more important now then any other social network, and also the fastest growing one.
- randomsearch 8y agoOr... Zuckerberg is lying. You certainly can’t treat anything he says as ground truth - you need independent figures.
- circadiam 8y agoIf only there were research apps to get those independent figures...oh wait.
- dymk 8y agoYou honestly think that Facebook is lying to investors about key metrics? Do you know how much of a field day of litigation the SEC would have if that were true?
- huac 8y agothey've lied about metrics before: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccurate-video-metrics-inflation-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
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- kerng 8y agoIt's not that it didn't happen in the past...
- fromthestart 8y agoAfter everything that FB has already lied about, the repeated examples of dark patterns, shady practices, the "dumb fucks" quote, is it really far-fetched to think that Zuckerberg would lie about this too, if he thought he could get away with it? Who's going to prove him wrong? Does anyone else have access to FB internal metrics? And what's the downside to lying? Worst case a slap on the wrist fine and a drop in stock price? Zuck has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be the type of person who will absolutely take advantage of any situation without any kind of ethical qualms. I'm not saying he's lying about this too, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least, SEC or no.
- m0zg 8y agoI hope this will pierce the HN anti-FB bubble somewhat. It's dangerous to believe one's own BS. FB is here to stay, although I do believe it will wither in the long term (5+ years).
- el_benhameen 8y agoI think you can be anti-FB while still recognizing that it's a powerful force in the industry and the world. Hell, I'd say that many are anti-FB because it's too powerful a force in the industry and the world.
- m0zg 8y agoAnti-FB is not quite the right term. What I meant is folks seem to believe that just because they don't use FB nobody else uses it, and the scandals are about to undo what remains of it. Whereas in the real world, outside the bubble, FB has 2 billion users and it's still growing both in terms of userbase, time spent on FB products, and revenues/profits.
- el_benhameen 8y agoThat's fair, and probably the interpretation I should have gone with.
- product50 8y agoWell - are they anti Google or anti Amazon?
- el_benhameen 8y agoYes, I would say that those who are concerned about Facebook for those reasons are also usually concerned about Amazon and Google for the same reasons.
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- randomsearch 8y agoCouple of points people are missing: - The biggest problem with Facebook in terms of immediate impact is not loss of privacy, though that’s real. It’s behavioural manipulation, which has lots of very negative outcomes for you as a user as well as society. Don’t think you’re not been manipulated, you are, and you are susceptible to it. Your behaviour and emotions are negatively impacted by the fact you use facebook. - This is not “capitalism” or “consumer voting with their money”. Firstly, due to network effects Facebook has a monopoly on their kind of product. The choice is Facebook vs no facebook. Second, the currency is time and attention to sell ads. Finally, most people are addicted to social media by design and it’s arguable whether they have a truly free choice. Is a gambling addict voting with their feet? The gambling addict knows they won’t win and usually knows they’re addicted; social media addicts people very subtly and manipulates you over time. Few people would admit to being addicted, but if you really think you’re not - fine, if it’s no big deal then just take a month off from social media and see what happens. Good summary is Jaron Lanier’s interview https://youtu.be/kc_Jq42Og7Q https://youtu.be/kc_Jq42Og7Q
- GoodJokes 8y agoWhen things shoot up despote objective bad news about it, this is when people should start questioning capitalism. Fictitious values are the godsend for capitalists. You can create perpetual growth this way. Short.
- Shinobi881 8y agoFacebook is taking the opportunity to air some of their dirty laundry. They realize that it takes quite a bit for users to abandon the platform and are probably strategically, leaking some of this stuff.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoWhat stuff are you refering to? They have to report earnings figures, they're a public company. And since they answer to investors they're going to share these stats that put them in a good light.
- strikelaserclaw 8y agoIn this era, the deeper you are able to see past the b.s that you are bombarded with, the more you will understand. Facebook has been bombarded with negative publicity for almost a year now, if you look past these articles, you will see that Facebook has not taken any sort of hit at all. Go see what the average person is like and you will understand why this is the case (This is also true for Donald Trump winning the election). We tech people live in a bubble.
- justapassenger 8y agoWhat data breach? Is this talking about CA? That was like two-three earnings ago? That’s pretty click-baity title.
- andy_ppp 8y agoFacebook is kind of like smoking; we all know the company makes you ill but there is plenty of cash to be made doing that.
- michelb 8y agoSo the question might be; is Facebook too big to fail?
- tgb29 8y agoThe media bias against Facebook has become outrageous and it worsened after the establishment in DC extended their witch hunt and made Facebook the scapegoat for the 2016 election.
- cityzen 8y agoThe only thing that bothers me about Facebook anymore is the realization that I live on a planet with, literally, billions of people that do not care about their privacy.
- tanilama 8y agoI am happy that Facebook endure this organized media smearing attacks. It is very obvious to me someone wants to shape a narrative against Facebook, and it is distasteful to dress such intention under an altruistic disguise, like destroying Facebook could save the mankind. Utter nonsense.
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