FBM and WhatsApp (which you mentioned) are the things to see if they can be even semi-monetized. They both have over 1.5B active users. If they can average a couple of dollars per user per year a piece in the next 5 years, that’ll prevent any major blows for the company as a whole. Or say they can only monetize them at a combined $5B rev a year with $2B profit and Facebook l.com profits and revenue decline in equal part while IG grows. That’s not such a big deal. We don’t know what else they can buy or come up with.
And FB as a company right now is the 5th most valuable company in the world. If their market cap, including inflation, drops by 20-25% over the next couple of years...they’ll still be a top 15 company by market cap in the world. If not possibly in the top 10. I haven’t checked this second so I might be off with some, but once you get out of the top 10 largest market cap companies, you get to companies like P&G, Disney, and some financial companies like BoA, MasterCard, maybe Wells Fargo. A bit farther down would be the telecoms like Verizon, Att. All ranging in the $2XXB range. All top 20 or so companies by market cap. FB is at $575B. Their P/E is 33 it seems. If their growth stagnates as a whole and their P/E drops to ~15, they’ll likely still be a $300B+ company.
I’m both those case FB as a whole is still doing pretty damn well.
That's a lot of ads.
I think the most exciting test for FB is whether it succeeds in monetizing WA and IG without killing engagement. I don't know if there is a comparable story of a mature network absorbing other mature networks (please share examples), but if they succeed it is evidence of a way to keep rolling their data and revenue advantage over from product to product - so who even cares about the blue app.