https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...
The market has separated these 5 pretty clearly now, with Meta trailing by quite a bit, Alphabet and Amazon in the middle, and Microsoft and Apple with a decent lead.
I don't really understand why we are comparing a company who develops social media applications and generates advertising revenue against Apple who generates most of it's revenue from selling Hardware, or Microsoft who generates most of it's revenue from licencing software.
If we are saying that Meta are trailing Apple, we might as well say that Microsoft are trailing Saudi Aramco.
http://www.innovationkm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/image...
http://www.innovationkm.com/the-market-cap-of-faang-changes-...
Another way to think of it is in the 2010s, a potential employee may have ranked a job at any of those companies as having similar security, but there is probably a different feeling about that now.
I get comparing Meta against Google, but why would we compare Meta against Apple? They are fundamentally different businesses.
2010 Meta 'Potential' vs 2010 Google 'Potential' - c$50bn vs c$200bn
2022 Meta 'Potential' vs 2022 Google 'Potential' - c580bn vs c$800bn
Meta grew >10x across the period, while Google grew c4x
I don't personally buy that Market Cap = Potential, but you would be twice as rich if you invested in Meta according to that graph than if you invested in Google, and you would have also done better investing in Meta across that period than Apple according to the graph you sent across.
https://watch.dqydj.com/timeseries/stock-calculator/
From May 21, 2012 (when META went public) to now, here are the annual returns:
MSFT - 24.53%
AAPL - 22.99%
AMZN - 22.07%
GOOGL - 18.09%
META - 14.36%
Facebook doesn't dominate social any more like it once did. It did so with Facebook itself then with instagram but TikTok is grabbing the current generation of new users.
It can't grow like it once did and usage of its existing services will gradually decline.
It's betting that the metaverse is the next social medium after TikTok's short form video. Personally I doubt that but that's the bet they're making.
Once the data doesn't leave America this is going to go away.
This is not that much different than just complying with the type of regulations the EU has. The American version is just involving a lot more chest pounding and fluff because there's no existing laws to enforce to make them do this. So they just have to do it through threats and relatively minor policy changes (like banning on government phones).
just last month https://www.npr.org/2023/02/14/1156726845/indian-tax-authori...
USA is different
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/23rs/sb20.html
The current version bans TikTok on all state owned computer networks (this includes banning web access). This includes public libraries, schools and universities. There's a substitute pending that would exclude universities from the ban. There's no guarantee that this substitute will be part of what gets passed.
Also the display ad market is only useful if you've got people to advertise to. The more Facebook continues to turn into 'social networking for boomers' the less and less they'll make.
Like, I left FB five years ago (after staying there for 5 years), and literally HN has been telling me that FB were doomed for all of that time.
I totally agree that TikTok is a very strong competitor, unlike what they've seen before, but writing FB off right now is probably not the wisest long-term decision.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts
already here
and not a chinese company
if Im gonna brainrot Ill use youtube
Is Meta really a tech company? It takes a lot of technology to do what they do, just like Netflix. But their core business isn't technology pre se, it's social media and advertising. I don't think they're the same class of businesses as Microsoft or Apple. Google is closer to Meta in terms of their revenue sources, but they have a much more diverse technology offering.
They are trying to become a hardware company with their VR line, but it feels more like a hobby in the Apple sense of the term. I.e., a division with small revenues and without a clear growth path.
1 in 4 people on earth is using FB every day. They simply can't grow more too much.
Google: 20:1 Amazon: 100:1 Netflix: 30:1 Apple: 22:1 Meta: 18:1
(For the financially illiterate like me who wanted to see what various ratios looked like. Meta (Facebook at the time) used to have a 7:1 ratio when they printed money before they doubled headcount while revenue flagged. If it weren’t for that hiring spree, they would be under 10:1 and not in the same class of “tech” multiples.
Apparently that's no longer the case: "Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Buries the Metaverse"[1]. Company name looks just silly at this point.
What is the latest cool Meta product which promises a bright future for the company? Well, llama is cool but it's not product and today's greatest social media sensation is TikTok.
I'm sure meta does have some great tech, in fact some of the work they did on VR with all these tens of billions of dollars is groundbreaking but that also failed as a product.
Why would they keep the workforce configuration the same if their current state is probably not what they want to be tomorrow?
It's not an actual drug so you can't just keep upping the dosage. I don't have the internal metrics and I'm sure they are still making gains, but I think their wave is going to be much smaller than Facebooks.
It's still very popular of course but just judging by the number of times phones have been shoved in my face to watch a tiktok at social events recently vs a year ago I have to feel their is some level of decline. I also notice that even the younger crowd isn't using it as much.
It seems to me that right now the most popular thing is sharing videos, both 3rd party and original within various group chats.
I think there is social media platform overload, and the best way to keep in touch with people that actually matter to you and be sure they see your content is having group chats where you share things and then talk about it. Just my anecdotal observation, I'm probably wrong.
It seems similar to the resurgence of piracy now that there are 50+ different streaming apps.
I’m aware of the Chinese thing and how it makes some people feel but IMHO TikTok is healthy in in comparison with the Instagram or Reddit for example. You still can spend hours once in though.
After years of stagnation with Meta, TikTok is a step forward.
Well, "addictive" literally means "cannot easily stop doing it"
Hum... Did the executives of all those large companies just happen to discover they aren't innovative at the same time? Or are they trying to prop-up their stock so they have time to exit on the prices created by the low-interest market?
One of those is way more likely than the other.
(But yeah, those companies have stopped innovating long ago.)
Investors will tend to tolerate other faltering metrics for high revenue growth in startups, but that’s not Meta.
(obviously, the analysis is more complicated than this, but you can see why investors may not think things are going gang-busters over at Meta)
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
Public sentiment is terrible and if that's a reliable leading indicator, the company will be in trouble if it doesnt continually diversify into products that distance themselves from the core brand.
This completely overlooks the changes that happened in that one year of not insane growth.
Apple cut Meta's legs off and Meta has no indication on how they're going to regrow them. The Metaverse is flopping, FB is seen as a place for hate, youths don't have accounts, etc, etc, etc.
Facebook is not the future of social media and Meta has not come up with a viable alternative.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/club-meeting-recap-cramer-sa...
Having an enormous cash pile is what allowed Apple to keep paying its employees when COVID shut everything down.
Every good company has a cash reserve. The one I work for has a policy of maintaining enough cash reserves to operate for 18 months with zero income. It saved our bacon when the virus came around.
Convenience and familiarity trumps other issues, even massive issues like privacy etc. You might be over estimating public's interest in giving their money only to honest, decent businesses - public gives their money to whoever entertains them cheaply and caters to their laziness.
Nothing is going to change, unless we all vote with our wallets. But we have already voted, we knowingly support monster companies like Amazon.
When you run a business, you look towards the future and what profit you're forecasting. You don't want to see decline in profits, you don't want to use your cash reserves to compensate for less profit.
Facebook reported $23.1 billion net profit in 2022, a decline on the $39.3 billion made in 2021.
Once again, Meta's death has been greatly exaggerated on this site.
What changed were the expectations of what their profit will be in 5, 10, 20 years.
The funny thing is, that's a bad bet. Large tech company profits can last for years and decades. The archetypal example is IBM. They've had some years or record losses, but overall, look at their yearly profits:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/earnings/
We're talking about probably more than $250bn of profits over 20 years.
https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
IBM has objectively been a terrible investment for many, many years.
I agree with this regarding their first product. Google wasn't the first ad network, Slack wasn't the first team chat, etc.
Very few of them seem to have ever had a follow-up hit product (whether original or copied). Apple and Microsoft are the only ones I can think of that did it.
Meta and Alphabet have only ever created profitable businesses by acquiring other companies. I'm not even sure anything is profitable at Alphabet other than their ad business (which I would now include with YouTube) and G-Suite.
Rarely if ever do they true novel inventors dominate the market because when the market doesn’t exist they have to create it, and also they’re inventors not necessarily business men.
His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good moves.
Acquiring your competitors to kill competition isn't a "good move," it's an obvious strategy that has existed for hundreds of years and is (rightly) illegal.
We unfortunately forgot the lessons of the Gilded Age in this country, and incredibly anti-competitive acquisitions like that have been tolerated on too many occasions.
It's easy to make "good moves" if regulators are ignoring you and you're comfortable with being immoral, as Zuckerberg always has been.
how is that any different than most of Silicon Valley?
Silicon Valley is what people thought the future looked like in 1994
It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is a limit to what you can do with websites and computers
Through robots in there and I'm not convinced there really is a limit, it just becomes difficult
-- Zuck probably.
I feel like 10K people are taking a hit because Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and monetization strategy.
Anyway, it's rough out there.
What do you mean?
Firing 10k people on the back of other layoffs just obscures that for a while.
This latest round is a re-run.
VR was talked up like crazy then and fizzled.
Sure. I'm just not sure I understand how the current focus/hype by Mark Zuckerberg/Meta can be THE cause for VR to fail (which is what was asserted by the person I was responding to).
I mean, are there literally nobody younger who is hyped about VR? Maybe not!
> On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
If true, that’s a pretty crazy coincidence.
> whole metaverse thing
pick one
Ironically apple entering AR/VR may be the best thing to happen to Meta if it helps bolster the ecosystem. Meta may not be #1 in the space for a long time, if ever, but they may be able to ride the wave to a strong #2