It's an incredible achievement to bootstrap a social network to the leader in its category in less than a year. And it demonstrates the power of Facebook and Instagram in being able to drive traffic.
It must be comforting for Meta to know that if they wanted to build a leading TikTok competitor or any other social network in the future they can easily do it.
They already did. It's called Reels.
I want smart people and weird but interesting schizos, not my "friends" from Instagram and Facebook. I mostly like those friends but I know their opinions on most things already for example.
Also unless one is being particularly pedantic he already has the only tiktok competitor (Instagram reels).
I'm really surprised to hear that. I don't really use either but wow.
Of course Meta is doing everything to make Threads work, and Elon is doing everything to burn X to the ground, there's that :P But yes it is impressive.
I don’t know why people trust stats from any social media company without independent verification. Stats can be massaged and there are large incentives to do it.
We know that the former Twitter board certainly did this, for example.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...
Their engaged audience is skewing older which is why it "feels" weird to you but not to everyone.
And that $4 billion is just per quarter. I honestly would love to see a full breakdown. Nintendo's entire revenue is 12 billion, which is less than Meta VR spends alone, and that includes everything Nintendo does, including developing games. How has Meta spent so much and has so little to show for it?
Recently picked up a Quest 3 and it's honestly astonishing. I (half) joking had the thought when they get to the Quest 5 or 6 and can get the cost down humanity is gonna be in serious trouble. I brought it to a family gathering and one person went out and bought one the next day. Another is going to pick one up as soon as they can find a good deal used.
Horizon worlds is admittedly a little goofy but this is one of the first revision of it. And it works well as drop in for some Apps like escape rooms which probably saves some dev work. I only breezed through the report but it looks like their numbers are up massively YOY.
Only complaints is passthrough is still a little distorted but an enormous improvement. Battery life could still be better but a battery pack helps balance the heatset anyway. Also you can't directly connect to steamVR without going through Quest link which I can't see any reason for other than being anti-competitive and user hostile.
The matrix is coming and I got a feeling metas gonna own it.
I don't know exactly how much they're losing on each Quest they sell, but the fact that it's significantly cheaper than any "dumb" headset that requires a PC or PS5 to do all of the heavy lifting, despite having what's effectively an entire smartphone built-in says it all really.
I could be mistaken, but I believe they were the ones to pioneer varifocal displays, a technology which has still yet to ship in an HMD. The earliest prototypes relied on physically moving the lens, where the latest prototypes are using some form of electrically charged lens that changes its focal distance based on voltage.
Once you start going down the rabbit hole of projects they've either announced or have been leaked it's easy to see how you could spend that kind of money, and that's only the stuff we know about.
There are some crucial avenues of research Meta is working on. Varifocal, form factor, face / body tracking, resolution - once these things are nailed, and I'm pretty sure it'll be in the next 10 years, then suddenly we're gonna WANT to be in Horizon Worlds. But it can't happen without massive R&D on the hardware side.
We don't know how much Apple spent on Vision Pro.
The project has been going on for at least a decade.
After all, when I go to the movies I don't go for a Disney cartoon but an action movie.
The user-generated content in VRChat is so much more compelling. It also looks better. And it's actually harder to do it.
Just offering some advice I think they reap what they sow with their unfortunately overfitting in their main? choice of applicant.maybe I’m wrong
To be fair to Facebook - they actually did offer me an interview
TLDR; im a self made millionaire now I’m just saying the people you want are the ones that don’t apply, too busy coding instead of applying to FAANGS
The nerd Internet was the best, but it's never coming back.
The bandwidth gave us streaming - okay, I'll give you that, but we had that before. It's more of an infrastructure thing than "interesting" tech.
Everything else has been OK.
Eventually we’ll probably move to a single OS that runs everything, your phone , computer , vr, will all be a single device( or course us old folks will probably still prefer monitor so).
If you see how poor Horizons is compared to something like VRChat that operates on a shoestring budget compare to meta's. Or something like viverse.
Their hardware is OK, but not groundbreaking. Their metaverse platform is really poor compared to the competition, although what they do have over the others is the ability to create in-world instead of in Unity. But really that doesn't stop creators. The environments in VRChat are much more compelling. I think part of this is Meta's way too strict moderation and content policy. Because really for adults a rubber-tile child playground is really just no fun. We need a bit of gritty.
So yeah really they're doing it wrong. I don't know how they do it exactly but clearly all that money goes to the wrong places.
I don't think this means VR is a bad idea. It can work, just not the way Meta thinks it can.
I would have agreed if Reality Labs was its own startup but they are supported by Meta. With that said, $12BN profit in one quarter for Meta is somehow "struggling"?
Wait until you see the wave of unprofitable AI startups and companies raising capital forever without a path to profitability in sight.
Meta can afford to spend billions into Reality Labs, until that unit itself becomes profitable. They are totally fine and it is still business as usual and they will be sitting comfortably for another decade.
The rest of the so-called AI startups taking in VC capital on the other hand...
Someone make it make sense
This is continuously adjusted as investor sentiment changes about where the company (and the economy at large) is going and what that “10 year valuation” is. A single quarterly result certainly could change that number if there’s a big surprise in there, but for the most part companies are good at predicting their revenue and expenses and that is priced into the stock already.
For Tesla, there was a wide expectation that they weren’t going to have a great quarter, it was pretty much known. So the stock was already significantly down before the earnings call. What was not expected was that Musk dedicated the company to building a cheaper car in the coming years. Investors thought this was a good move, stock goes up.
Now look at Meta, it was widely expected they’d have good results this quarter, so stock price is already up recently. What changed in this report is their expenses are much higher than what they previously estimated. So the stock goes down.
The actual quarterly results are a factor in the price but generally those are priced in already, unless you get some big surprise. What’s more important is the investor sentiment about whether the company is going in the right direction, which can change on a whim and for no reason at all.
It isn't that hard to figure out that one has been extraordinarily bullish and priced to perfection and one has been extraordinarily bearish as if they are going out of business.
> Facebook daily active users estimate: 2.11 billion
> Facebook monthly active users estimate: 3.08 billion
> Average Family service users per day estimate: 3.16 billion
> Average Family service users per month estimate: 3.97 billion
If I'm parsing this correctly, they have around 3.16 billion DAU across all services. That's an insane number of people.
Which really makes me wonder why their social media platforms suck so much. I recently re-opened Facebook and it was a desert wasteland with a handful of people I knew years ago sharing memes. Instagram has a few more users than Facebook, but aside from catching the occasional story update from a couple people, I mostly use it to follow artist accounts. And nobody that I know is participating on Threads at all.
It seems really difficult to find anything interesting on their platforms. On Facebook I looked up groups for some of my interests, and they're either completely dead or being kept alive by occasional posts of creators sharing their latest releases.
So what are these 3 billion people even doing on Meta's platforms?
Total available attention is finite. Yet content keeps exploding. There is only one conclusion.
Also, there's a lot more people using FB than you think. Most people over the age of 50 are on FB, not IG/reddit/Tiktok
https://www.reuters.com/legal/meta-platforms-must-face-adver...
Basically, never ignore these things.
I also remember around Google's IPO people questioning how they'd ever make money.
