Meta's Profit Slides by More Than 50 Percent as Challenges Mount (nytimes.com) 84
The social networking company, which is trying to shift into the so-called metaverse, posted falling sales and said it was "making significant changes" to operate more efficiently. The New York Times reports: This year, Meta's earnings have been hit hard by its spending on the metaverse and its slowing growth in social networking and digital advertising. In July, the Silicon Valley company posted its first sales decline as a public company. Its stock has plunged more than 60 percent this year. On Wednesday, Meta continued that trajectory and indicated that the decline would not end anytime soon. It said it would be "making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently," including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.
The company reported a 4 percent drop in revenue for its third quarter -- to $27.7 billion, down from $29 billion a year earlier. Net income was $4.4 billion, down 52 percent from a year earlier. Spending soared by 19 percent from a year earlier. The company's metaverse investments remained troubled. Meta said its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for the virtual reality and augmented reality efforts that are central to the metaverse, had lost $3.7 billion compared with $2.6 billion a year earlier. It said operating losses for the division would grow "significantly" next year. For the current quarter, Meta forecast revenue of between $30 billion and $32.5 billion, which would be down from a year ago. The company's shares fell more than 11 percent in after-hours trading. In a statement, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and chief executive, acknowledged "near-term challenges on revenue." But he added that "the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth" and that he was "approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency."
The company reported a 4 percent drop in revenue for its third quarter -- to $27.7 billion, down from $29 billion a year earlier. Net income was $4.4 billion, down 52 percent from a year earlier. Spending soared by 19 percent from a year earlier. The company's metaverse investments remained troubled. Meta said its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for the virtual reality and augmented reality efforts that are central to the metaverse, had lost $3.7 billion compared with $2.6 billion a year earlier. It said operating losses for the division would grow "significantly" next year. For the current quarter, Meta forecast revenue of between $30 billion and $32.5 billion, which would be down from a year ago. The company's shares fell more than 11 percent in after-hours trading. In a statement, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and chief executive, acknowledged "near-term challenges on revenue." But he added that "the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth" and that he was "approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency."
50% drop, that's terrible (Score:5, Funny)
Is there a GoFundMe we can sign up for to help this poor company out?
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You jest, but rest assured at some point it will be considered important enough to qualify for a bailout, i.e. a mandatory GoFundMe, funded by your tax money, whether you want it or not.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Anyone who doesn't want to be on the receiving end of an aggressive slander campaign by Metastasis against them, I'd say.
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Re:50% drop, that's terrible (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a GoFundMe we can sign up for to help this poor company out?
Law enforcement has become so dependent on the 4th-amendment workaround that Facebook and Google provide, that I would not be surprised to see government infusions of cash
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Mod parent sadly insightful, though I was hoping for more funny on the story.
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Username checks out.
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Yes. It does. Thanks.
Re: Sayonara (Score:3)
The net is also full of articles on why the Earth is flat. That doesn't make it true.
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Gosh, clever. If it isn't;t obvious that social media is now the public square to you there's no point in even trying to discuss anything.
Where exactly do -you- think it is? A guy in a park standing on a box yelling at strangers walking by? *eye roll*
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Social media is now the public square.
Even if you're right, which you might be, that doesn't make any specific social media outlet the public square. It makes the assemblage of all social media networks the public square. Also, if Nazis want to have an event in a public square, they can and should be denied. And if they have an event in a public square, they can and should be driven out. We literally had a war about this, and beyond that, literal Nazis (which some of these people will happily tell you they are, while others just make it obvious
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The ACLU disagreed with you on Nazis having a march in public.
Why should only people we agree with have free speech rights?
Who decides which books get burned?
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The ACLU disagreed with you on Nazis having a march in public.
The Nazis should be able to have a march, and the rest of us should be able to kick their asses all the way to Germany, which oh yeah doesn't want them either and would drive them into the sea.
Yeah, I realize we have to put them on a vehicle to get them there. I suggest a leaky boat.
Nazis want another war. We should give it to them.
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This has been well covered on this site and many others.
No it hasn't. It is just angry people making assertions.
I am one of the many, many people who have no interest in Twitter at all and it has had exactly zero influence on my free speech rights.
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I don't use it either but I also don't attempt to influence public policy. If I did and was blocked from twitter then my ability to influence others and bring my ideas to the public would be infringed. Censorship is censorship.
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The self-avowed Nazis and those using Nazi symbology without irony can safely be lumped in with the Nazis they want to emulate. At worst, you will only be wrong because they are less competent, which doesn't make them not Nazis, just extra-pathetic ones.
Anyone willing to march next to Nazis is a Nazi
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It doesn't matter what label you or anyone else wants to slap on someone. Being a Nazis makes you a scum bag. It doesn't remove your right to speech.
The 1st amendment doesn't say, "shall not be infringed... unless we don't like you because you're a dick".
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Being a Nazis makes you a scum bag. It doesn't remove your right to speech.
Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, remember? Admitting you're part of a hate crime group (at best, if you're only an amateur Nazi) should get you special attention.
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Sure. The police or FBI can investigate or watch you with proper warrants, for example.
But -nothing- you say or view you can hold can remove your 1st amendment rights. They are inalienable.
Nazis, fascists, kkk, black panthers, and all sorts of other racists and assorted trash have the same right to speak as everyone else.
The moment they don't it is no longer a right but a privilege. Privileges are granted by others and may be just as easily removed. Who would you have declare Nazis don't have 1a rights?
One-sided isn't balanced (Score:5, Interesting)
I was going to suggest you might want to turn off Fox news and watch a few other news outlets when I realized I had not heard of any of these events being reported on my preferred news outlets.
I guess it's time to admit the elephant in the room and acknowledge that MOST news outlets pick and chose the stories they report based on what they consider their target audience. There's enough "news" out there that every news organization must decide what to report each day; however, looking at the difference between the headlines on Fox News and MSNBC makes it abundantly clear that the editorial decisions are almost 180 degrees apart.
I guess this is a realization that I need to monitor both news outlets, if for no other reason than to see what topics are being selected for reporting to each side of the argument. All news organizations have talking heads that report "THE" news of the day and conveniently leave out topics that don't support their editorial slant and I'm realizing that by not viewing at least the headlines of the other news outlets that I'm just as clueless to what half the country is seeing as "THE" news and I'm just as biased as I began to accuse you of.
We might not like it but we're in a very polarized country right now but by only getting our news from sources that make us comfortable it leaves us ill informed about other news items that should be important to many of us. I don't think we need to agree with everything each news source is reporting but at the very least it clues us in to what each side is being fed.
This probably won't be a popular post but it is a realization that not everything being reported on the opposite viewpoint is fear mongering. Both sides obviously have an agenda and it's probably best if we all know what the other side's is and not just what "our" talking heads tell us.
The soapbox is now yours.
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The guy who shot the grandmother claimed it was an accident -- but his story is that he fired a "warning shot", left his finger inside the trigger guard, and then tried to shove her clipboard with his gun. The victim disagrees with his story. A grand or petit jury will presumably decide whether the shooting was intentional (he was already charged with felonious assault [probably for the warning shot] and reckless discharge of a firearm causing injury, and prosecutors could add more charges), but it was at
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You think your 'both sides' position is reasonable, but it isn't. It's just an excuse not to think.
See, it's not a matter of bias introduced through selective reporting. We live in an age where certain "news" outlets are just flat-out lying to you. Inventing "news" out of whole cloth to push a transparent political agenda. Some news programs have even argued in court that no reasonable person would believe the nonsense they report as fact. [findlaw.com]
That's what we're up against.
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You realize that Fox was just borrowing a defense that Rachel Maddow [lowelaw.com] previously used, right?
Knowing the history makes your "That's what we're up against" ring hollow.
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LOL! No, that's now the same thing at all. I'll bet some idiot will believe you though.
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Does anyone actually go to Rachel Maddow for the news? She is a talking head the same way Tucker is although slightly less destructive.
Smart people don't watch Fox, CNN or MSNBC
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MSNBC is basically the Fox News of the left. They copied pretty near everything.
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Starting to miss newspapers honestly.
They still exist.
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The US has 750k violent crime incidents per year. A hand-picked set of anecdotes does not, will not, and cannot let anybody "recognize who's using violent, totalitar
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Some of this made the news. Don't assume that it's a story just because Fox says it should be a story.
The problem with the story about the 18 year old getting run over is that the police doubt that the 18 year old was run over because of politics. They think the attacker made the excuse up to justify his actions after the fact.
The Republican canvasser is an actual racist whose social media posts contained a lot of anti black posts. He isn't well liked in the neighborhood he was canvassing and he didn't ev
Re:Sayonara (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter should have been an RFC and a client with the obligatory option of a port 443 gateway of course; not a company. To the extent that it should employ anybody at all, it should simply be one more task on the lists of sysadmins globally. "Time to patch the Twitter server along with all the other crap".
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+1 IETF honorable
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It exists, one based on an RFC (XMPP) , adding extensions via pubsub.
https://salut-a-toi.org/docume... [salut-a-toi.org]
Doesn't seem to lively though.
And another one: ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Essentially working on reinventing XMPP over json+http.
This one actually is a W3C recommendation. Go figure...
I suppose there are others.
The user got the choice and the choice was made (Score:2)
Maybe Musk can force Apple to pay him 30% of ad revenue when they connect through Starlink.
poor meta (Score:3, Insightful)
schadendorphins (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't figure out which has released more schadendorphins. The Bitcoin fund losing over a billion or ... nah it's this. The scale is bigger. The victims more concentrated and deserving..
Hi! We'll sell you something you never wanted! (Score:4, Funny)
Uh. Why is nobody buying in?
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Butbutbutbutbut... we TOLD you that you want this! What went wrong here?
I know it, we have to hire some influenzas to tell you!
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Fire him, ok. But it should be out of a cannon.
Facebook will last (Score:4, Insightful)
But Zuckerberg is firmly, permanently in control, and he’s gonna continue to make money hand over fist. But it’s not going to be in the same category as Apple, Microsoft and Google.
i disagree facebook will die quickly (Score:3)
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Or maybe as old people who shit the place up die, the young people will come back.
Personally I hope the whole thing folds. If I were in Zuckerfuck's position I'd be trying to get as much cash out of it as possible so I could have a boat drink retirement so as to have a nice place to sit and watch the world burn
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Nope, as the old farts croak, the younger farts grow older and you still don't get the demographic that you want because you still have the (ad-wise) worthless 40+ year olds you can't sell to your customers.
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Facebook is for old people really. The good thing for Meta is that they managed to buy Instagram and that does have a big amount of young people in it. Although the whole "this is the hip social network now" thing is tiresome or stupid. I don't know why but young people seem to like switching SNs every two years.
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Because their parents follow them. Parents want to see what their kids do, and kids don't want their parents to see what they do. So what happens is simply this:
1) Kid signs up for social media network.
2) Parents find out about social media network and sign up, too.
3) Parents badger kid to "friend" them.
4) Kid has to give in because, well, you can't really say no.
5) Kid searches for other SMN because this one is now "tainted" and can't be used for "private" stuff anymore.
6) Repeat from 1.
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This is where the Google+ concept of circles would have come in handy. It made it easy to share things with one group (circle) of friends and not another.
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I don't think 41 year olds are worried about their parents seeing their Facebook posts.
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As anyone in marketing will tell you, your target audience is the 14-25 crowd. Maybe up to 30. Anyone past that age is set in their way and near impervious to advertising. They have their preferences, they have their brands and moving them away to something different is very, very hard. Getting them excited for something new is even harder.
You're no advertising to 30+ year olds, you're advertising to their kids and hope that the parents will rather give in to the screaming whining buoys, that you won over w
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brand loyalty is also a thing of the past
That is what generally happens when marketers think a brand should be premium priced but then go sacrifice the very things that made people like the brand (quality, uniqueness etc) in the first place. We stopped being loyal to brands when brands stopped being loyal to their customers.
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Facebook will last for about the same reason oil tankers keep moving forward after their engines have been off for a long while: Pure inertia.
Serves them right. (Score:2)
Just because I'm a template metaprogrammer.
The problem (Score:4, Insightful)
They bet the farm on AR, as in alternate reality.
RIP (Score:3)
Boomer Hangout (Score:1)
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Facebook made the unforgivable mistake of catering to "everyone", forgetting that this means that, since they're a social media platform, this means that they run into the problem of wanting the kids and getting the parents, and if you have the parents you'll invariably lose the kids.
As the platform ages, so does the user base and the very LAST thing anyone between the age of 11 and 111 wants is to share their hopes, dreams, fears and most of all secrets with their parents.
Founder's syndrome (Score:4, Interesting)
Metaverse expectations? (Score:1)
FB/Meta stock drops 12% (Score:2)
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Not? But that's how you play the Metastasis game.
First, create an online persona. The more far out and weird, the better. Then click on every ad that you get that matches this persona and see just how deep the rabbit hole can go and just what kind of batshit insane nutjobs actually advertise with them.
It's generally advised to do that with accounts that you harvest from C2 takedowns, just to make the life of other users interesting, too.
Huh (Score:3, Interesting)
Two stories almost next to each other, first Google, and then Facebook.
Could it be, oh, I dunno, the economy? Bidenflation and all that?
Nah, it must be {insert whatever reason we hate those two companies today}.
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Both of them got slapped by Apple asking people if they wanted to be tracked. Google less so because they were smart enough to get lots of people to use their OS by giving it away for free. Meta is trying to do something similar but they're a) late and b) bad at it.
Musk to the Rescue! (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe Elon can help Meta out. I bet he has some ideas!
Says every CEO... (Score:4, Interesting)
the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth ... approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency.
This corporate BS is always touted when a business is cratering and nobody has a clue how to solve it.
Except, in this case it's an easy solution:
1. Turf Zuckerberg from anything other than a ceremonial role at Meta / Facebook / whatever. Certainly, get him out of decision-making roles.
2. Pull the plug on the metaverse and end that division immediately.
From the numbers in the summary alone, their net income would almost double from $4.4 bil to $8.1 bil. I get it's not that simple, but plugging the leaks will help things a lot.
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>Except, in this case it's an easy solution:
>1. Turf Zuckerberg from anything other than a ceremonial role at Meta / Facebook / whatever. Certainly, get him out of decision-making roles.
Except, in this case, it's not an easy solution:
1. Zuckerberg, who sits as both Chair and CEO, owns 58% of the Company's voting shares.
A shame (Score:2)
Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.