Nuked Mark Zuckerberg told the world last October that he was all in on the metaverse. Now that his company’s stock price has been hammered in recent months, he is calling back that rhetoric.
Meta’s profits for the first quarter were $ 7.5 billion, down 21 percent from the year-ago period. Revenue rose 7 percent to $ 27.9 billion, the slowest growth rate since the company went public a decade ago.
Zuckerberg is still spending billions a year building devices and software for the metaverse. The reality Labs division of meta has about 17,000 employees and lost almost $ 3 billion last quarter alone.
In the case of meta, its price has plummeted nearly 50 percent, evaporating the last five years of growth. Zuckerberg revealed he was already spending $ 10 billion a year on reality Labs.
Tiktok is eating into time spent on both Facebook and Instagram. Apple’s ad tracking changes have already cost meta more than $ 10 billion. Regulators have blocked Zuckerberg’s ability to make big, transformative acquisitions in social media that could jumpstart growth again.
The blue app managed to grow daily users by just 4 percent to 1.96 billion last quarter. Daily users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook ticked up slightly from 2.82 billion to 2.87 billion.
‘meta’s ad business continues to face some very real challenges,’ says insider intelligence analyst jasmine enberg. Combined with the rise of TikTok, brand safety concerns, and a shift in social media user behavior, there’s a perfect storm heading straight for meta’s commercial revenues.
The company’s short-form video product, reels, accounted for 20 percent of time spent on Instagram. Meta is early in monetizing reels with ads, but it is following the same playbook Zuckerberg used to successfully copy Snapchat’s stories feature.
Cambria will focus on’work use cases and eventually replacing your laptop or work setup’. The next major hardware product will be a high-end mixed reality headset codenamed cambria later this year.
