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Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2021 Results
- marc__1 5y agoInteresting commentary on the 'metaverse' >Starting with our results for the fourth quarter of 2021, we plan to break out Facebook Reality Labs, or FRL, as a separate reporting segment. As we have discussed, we are dedicating significant resources toward our augmented and virtual reality products and services >We expect our investment in Facebook Reality Labs to reduce our overall operating profit in 2021 by approximately $10 billion. We are committed to bringing this long-term vision to life and we expect to increase our investments for the next several years.
- ArtWomb 5y agoI feel like "network effects" in the metaverse will be compounded cubic: the nodes, the edges, then the third mysterious component emerging from the shared hallucination itself ;)
- kurthr 5y agoI suspect the upcoming HW need of XR metaverse is in the foveal rendering required for low latency retina resolution immersive HMD. For cost/weight/power that probably means eye-tracking, which is gold standard for ad tracking and marketing attention metrics. Give away the hardware to high status college students and sell their attention metrics to advertisers. Very FB! Of course you need content too, but users can provide that, right?
- ArtWomb 5y agoRight. Today, video game streamers prefer to disguise their identity behind 2D anime style virtual avatars ("v-tubers"). Same reach, but their irl persona gets shielded from trolls ;)
- kurthr 5y agoPimax's Next-Generation Reality 12K QLED VR https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pimaxs-next-generation-reality-12k-qled-vr-headset-defies-belief https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pimaxs-next-generation-rea... Note that it is dual HDR LCD with miniLED backlights not OLED as described, but it is retina and foveated rendering with eye-tracking from Tobi.
- randomsearch 5y agoWhilst I despise Facebook, I thought Zuckerberg was extremely savvy in picking up WhatsApp and Instagram (which I didn’t see coming), and also pursuing VR (which I absolutely did). But there’s a big difference between acquiring near-winners and building something entirely new. Perhaps I’m just being hopeful, but it seems unlikely to me that Facebook is an organisation that could construct something entirely new and execute it well. They’ll have lots of competition and buying it out will probably not be an option, given the intense scrutiny they’ve attracted. So I wouldn’t bet on Facebook to own the next generation of social platforms.
- poaal 5y agoMarket agrees. You get better returns just buying the S&P500 over FB shares. Hence their 50 billion stock buyback to slow down the falling share price.
- 1cvmask 5y agoThe Tl;dr Facebook reports Q3 revenue up 35% YoY to $29.0B, profit of $9.2B, up 17% YoY, DAUs up 6% to 1.93B, headcount up 20% to 68,177, and ups share buybacks by $50B
- jasode 5y agoInteresting that Apple in April rolled out privacy prompts[1] that Facebook complained about (and tried to persuade public opinion with a full-page ad in December 2020) ... and yet it didn't seem to slow down Facebook's numbers by much: 2021-09 $28.2b revenue, $9.1b income +17% 2020-09 $21.2b revenue, $7.8b income Possibilities: - ads shown to iPhone FB users smaller piece of revenue pie than Android FB users - advertisers keep spending the same amount (or more) even though they have less info because of less tracking of Apple users to correlate with dollars spent People keep saying FB is in trouble but it doesn't matter if it's the leaked research about emotional manipulation, or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or extra Apple privacy features. The revenue keeps coming in and growing. Who thinks all of today's press about the recent whistleblowers will have any effect on next year's numbers? [1] 96% of iOS users opt out of app tracking: https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+apple+opt-in+privacy+users+96+percent https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+apple+opt-in+privac...
- ojbyrne 5y agoYou have your dates transposed.
- crate_barre 5y agoInsane right? This is behemoth, they would need a near calamity to stop printing money.
- gonehome 5y agoFB is the least likely to be hurt by Apple's move since they have their own massive number of users across multiple properties and lots of tracking on the web. If anything they might benefit by smaller players that have less access getting hurt more by Apple. I'm not personally a fan of FB (mostly due to the ad based business model), but today's negative press will have zero affect on them - mostly because (imo) it's bullshit. A lot of the issues FB deals with are social problems at scale. It's insane that any one company is expected to successfully moderate three billion people, they're doing the best they can with impossible constraints. If anything unseats them it'll be a technical shift that moves things to protocols 'web3'. Zuckerberg is an extremely good CEO though so I suspect he's already planning for this potential and FB's upcoming name change and structure is probably a way to accommodate this (in addition to having Oculus be a more separate entity for VR/AR and the next platform).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cm2012 5y agoI commented after the IOS14 stuff that FB revenue would obviously go up in Q3 as it has every quarter for years, to some incredulity on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27845536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27845536. As always, FB keeps on trucking.
- ksec 5y agoAnd I remember that :) So thank you for the quality comments. Especially from people working in the ads industry. Which often get attacked on HN just due to its nature.
- bamboozled 5y agoIs this because people still use Instagram and not "Facebook"?
- pavlov 5y agoLiterally billions of people use Facebook. It’s amazing how supposedly rational people on HN are perfectly willing to extrapolate from their own highly biased sample just because they don’t like company X. (See also “nobody uses Windows”, “nobody in America has an Android phone”, etc.)
- slownews45 5y agoOr iphone/apple have "sealed their fate" by not doing something like the headphone jack or a replaceable battery or whatever.
- fzil 5y agocomments like that always remind of that rsync guy's comment on dropbox's launch on HN. I wonder how this weird blindspot develops in people.
- slownews45 5y ago
- bryan_w 5y agoThe share buyback amount seems kinda high, I guess they are expecting even more free cash flow in the future?
- missedthecue 5y agoIt's only five per cent of outstanding shares. How much RSU comp dilutes the shareholder base each year? Gotta counteract that.
- brink 5y agoI'm really impressed that with Facebook's poor reputation and age that it's still able to grow by 11% daily active users in a year.
- MattGaiser 5y agoAnecdote, but my grandparents joined to connect with family members they couldn't regularly see due to the pandemic. They don't even own cell phones.
- m0zg 5y agoProbably creative accounting. Nobody really knows what their "users" actually mean anymore. There's no way to really grow users from their particular baseline.
- rednerrus 5y agoThe dollars on the bottom line kept going up as well.
- m0zg 5y agoThe dollars can keep going up through collusion with Google, to give just one example. Or by smothering existing uses with even more ads. Or by charging more for ads. Or all of the above at the same time. Dollars and users are not directly proportional. Particularly the low-RPU foreign users responsible for whatever non-creative part of this growth that exists, if any.
- Jonanin 5y agoI'm impressed by the extent to which people actually believe media narratives match reality.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago11% growth for FB would be very impressive. However, the growth numbers are for FB, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. 11% growth is for Monthly Active People (whatever that is). Monthly Active Users (MAU) - the more common metric - grew by 6%. It's possible that FB is actually shrinking - while Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp are growing. They don't provide enough data to know that.
- alangibson 5y agoI loathe Fb as much as anyone, but if you're just looking to make money their stock is the biggest 'buy' on Earth. Their numbers only get better in the face of bad news, they've barely started tapping the potential revenue from Ig, and they haven't even begun to monetize Whatsapp.
- nojito 5y agoMaybe but FB/google and Apple are in the cross hairs of the DOJ and it’s likely we will see a Microsoft level ruling come down on all three of them.
- rib3ye 5y agoI think point I think the insiders 90% "know" whether DOJ action is going to come down or not and have already built that into the stock price.
- alangibson 5y agoIt's hard to say that MS was hurt by the DOJ given their current market cap. Also, the US federal government is a shambles. They can't put together an inquiry on what lead to the seat of government being literally overrun, so I'd be incredibly surprised if they managed to take action against one of the most well funded entities on earth.
- nielsbot 5y agoIt's started in the House anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_the_January_6_Attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Com...
- RspecMAuthortah 5y agoYou forget DOJ and the entire executive branch it reports to are pretty much bought by lobbyists, many of whom directly or indirectly work for FB and other big tech.
- sydthrowaway 5y agoThis behemoth is unstoppable. Join or die.
- paxys 5y agoTheir investor call was a lot more interesting than the numbers themselves. Facebook all but confirmed TikTok as an existential threat, and is spending billions over the next few years to retool their product line to focus on "young adults". Metaverse came up as well, of course, and I still don't think anyone knows what that actually means.
- dougmwne 5y agoIt means straight up Snowcrash. They are burning 10 billion a year on Oculus and related VR/AR bets. Metaverse/Horizons will be a social platform for VR and AR with a heavy focus on face to face socializing.