Where does the growth come next though? Do they need to diversify their revenue streams away from advertising? Do they just start paying out dividends or can they really reinvest earnings at a sufficient return to satisfy shareholders?

They did selectively start buying back shares recently as a form of capital return. I'd expect that to continue to the extent the stock remains modestly priced versus the business growth rate.

If all they do is keep on the same path, they easily get from here to $100+ billion in sales by doing nothing special beyond what they're already doing. Plus ~$35 billion in profit to go with it.

A mere 6% average sales growth per year for the next ten years gets them to $100b in sales. More likely, they get there in fiscal 2022 without much trouble.

I'm amazed they haven't taken a crack at Google with a search engine in their app. Imagine how valuable combining Facebook's data with the user intent of search? A lot of users would never leave the facebook app on their phone if they could get a search engine that's halfway decent. It seems like they are leaving a ton of money on the table as it stands

If its too much to develop their own maybe they could team up with Bing or something?

Looks too stable to me (especially taking into account the scandals).

What's the definition of DAU anyway? E.g. if I used it on 2 days in a row, e.g. yesterday and today, and then do nothing, am I counted as a DAU or not for that quarter? Or maybe I have to be active for at least 50% of the total days of the quarter? Etc... .

Thx

This quote from an analyst is one reason why I believe the user numbers.

> "It's hard to get people to stop using something they love. People love using these products, and there's these massive attacks that news outlets continue to heap on them, but consumers like these platforms and advertisers follow eyeballs. Most of Facebook's advertisers have no other place to go with a return on investment this good. This is clear proof."

In my dream world I'd love to see a more granular ARPU breakdown and how much of that came from growth in ad impressions/user vs. increased CPMs for advertisers as well as some sort of count of advertisers and their spend by tier of advertiser size. If I recall correctly, one of the fairly recent moves was cutting bad on FB feed ad frequency which resulted in increasing CPMs and in theory concentrating the advertiser base further to those big brands that can afford the higher CPMs.

Many advertisers are experiencing higher CPMs on FB properties as one might expect as they consolidate their hold on the market. As that continues, at a certain point ROI may not be that good, and they may see diminishing returns and look elsewhere. That's the normal cycle of saturation of ad sources. The question is how long FB can stretch that out and innovate.

In the meanwhile I found this (2015) about MAU: https://www.adweek.com/digital/monthly-active-users-definiti...

>>We define a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger app (and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.

I suppose that DAU is the same, but of course daily.

Still, the chart looks too nice to me => personally, I always automatically mistrust any chart that looks that nice/regular.

Do we know what percentage of this could be from bots or other third party software?

I’d love to see independent polling via street surveys in a few countries to test their numbers.

Dumping here links of DAU/MAU charts of other apps (no specific selection - it's all what I was able to find):

MAU

- WeChat: https://www.statista.com/statistics/255778/number-of-active-...

- Twitter: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly...

- Instagram: https://www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly...

DAU:

-Snapchat: https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/

The most stable one seems to be the one of WeChat? I personally understood that without it, when living in China, your life can get very hard as you're not even able to pay for some services or get loans etc... (therefore there is a lot a direct pressure to use it).

You mean you'd expect a meaningful drop. Why? I expected very little consequence. People know Facebook doesn't cost them a monthly fee to use, they realize it's a huge entity that runs advertising to pay the bills. Everyone using the Internet these days is familiar with advertising online. The bulk of the users are precisely the ones that aren't shocked by the privacy scandal. They get to use Facebook and don't have to pay cash for it, they know the deal even if only broadly. Despite the endless attempts by the media to portray all FB users as ignorant.

Target had a huge scandal of stolen customer information. They didn't lose a big part of their sales. Equifax isn't going out of business. Few consumers stopped using Windows over Microsoft's business tactics in the 1990s or after. Walmart used to particularly pay their employees terribly and were pretty vicious cutthroats with suppliers and competitors (still are), outside of a tiny group none of it stopped people from shopping there. Amazon is guilty of a lot of that same behavior over the last two decades.

There's a required threshold for how bad Facebook's behavior would have to be, to turn the average user off of their 'free' service. They haven't got near that level yet. For most people it's a useful social utility that connects them to everyone they know and they don't have to pay money for it. Users will put up with a lot accordingly.

That would assume that news is accurately reporting reality. News is a business as well, you create issues, pile on, and gather ad impressions. There's definitely built-in pressure to exaggerate as a result.

Some of the most egregious is attributing short-term market trends with specific political issues (as opposed to noise or changes market fundamentals).

The darker side is when how news companies can shape public perception. In this case, the business models of the news are under attack by content aggregators like facebook and google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger

I can’t remember when I last heard a person say “I love facebook.” Plenty saying “I hate it” though.

Maybe he was alluding to “are addicted to” or “are manipulated into using?”

People don’t use Facebook because they love it. They resent it and but use it, mostly. Which makes me think it’s headed for a steep decline.

I also think "there's nothing wrong with messenger", I don't finds its experience loathsome like Facebook. That said, I also don't "love" it any more than Signal, Whatsapp, iMessage etc. It'll be really interesting to see how the unification of messaging works out - they could "Facebookify " it, I wonder how people will respond if there's a stronger focus on ads.

Or maybe they have no choice. If car companies only make black cars, it doesn't necessarily mean that black is everyone's favorite color.

But, in the end all of them are monitored so there is no choice there. The main argument/excuse for acceptance seems to be that it is better to be spied on by your own government than somebody else's.

AFAIK, you count the number unique users each day, and then compute the average over a period like a quarter. Media reports often make it sound like a DAU is someone who uses a service each and every day, but this is obviously wrong.