I have been told “nobody uses Facebook”.
Last quarter, 1.88 Bn “nobody” used Facebook daily.
Lots of interesting data points and snippets on this call. Here are my notes.
2/ Numbers in this quarter was a thing of beauty (perhaps applies to all big tech). They are making quite a mockery of “law of large numbers”.
FB’s 2016 *annual* topline was $27 Bn. Wow!
Acceleration in VR (other)+ overall revenue growth+ operating leverage make you drool.
3/ DAU +8% YoY; MAU +10%; Family DAP +15%
# of impressions +12%, avg price/ad +30%
Zuck highlighted three topics on the call:
I. AR/VR
II. Social Commerce
III. Creator Economy
4/ AR/VR:
“AR/VR are going to enable a deeper sense of presence in social connection than any existing platform.”
“The most used apps are social, which fits our original theory for why we wanted to build this platform in the first place”
Still early days
5/ “in virtual reality, I think you need to get to a high-quality wireless experience. In augmented reality, you're going to really need a pair of glasses that look like normal looking glasses”
6/ Social Commerce:
“more than 1 billion people visit Marketplace each month.”
250 mn MAU Shops visitors.
Business messaging grew by 40% over the last year.
7/ Creator economy:
Zuck seems to be all-in on creator economy.
I prefer the all-in approach. Make everything available. See which one works better and then double down on it. Harder to predict which one is the best approach without iteration.
8/ On personalized ads: “We're doing a huge amount of work to prepare”
Sheryl is making a case for personalized ads here. I find it ironic how much misinformation other people propagate on Facebook and then blame Facebook for misinformation.
9/ Advertising 101: it’s all relative game.
If post-IDFA, FB’s data points yield better result vs other platforms, that would be a gift FB didn’t ask for but will gleefully accept nonetheless.
10/ “We've also seen strong growth across ads in Facebook Watch, which now has more than 1.25 billion people visiting every month”.
People watch “Facebook Watch”? Huh, that’s news to me as well.
11/ Outlook: expect Q2 to post similar growth as Q1, but expect material deceleration in 2H. Ad revenue will be primarily driven by price, not # of ad impressions.
12/ 2021 opex outlook increased from $68-73 Bn to $70-73 Bn. Capex outlook declined from $21-23 Bn to $19-21 Bn
Is engagement going to be problem post-pandemic? It’s a headwind, but nothing dramatic expected in 2021.
On IDFA: “the impact on our own business, we think, will be manageable” (this is Wehner,so when he says “manageable”, it probably means much better)
14/ Facebook does not optimize its feed to increase your time spent on the app.
15/ Zuck is a 36-year old centi-billionaire who was deeply reminded recently that the future of his empire is still somewhat beholden to the whims of Apple. I expect Zuck to go really deep into AR/VR. If this stuff had even 10% prob. of outsized success, it's now 40-60%.
End/ Thanks to @theTIKR for the quick upload of transcripts (no affiliation)
Imagine you're building a portfolio of stocks for the next 10 years. Let's assume ~30% stocks in S&P 500 will outperform and the rest ~70% will underperform the $SPY total return after 10 years.
Assume, when you stumble onto an outperformer, you correctly pick it 70% of the time. And when you come across an underperformer, you're also right 70% of the time to avoid it.
So, here's what the decision tree looks like:
Now the question: when you pick ANY stock, what is the probability that it will turn out to be a good decision based on these probabilities?
Good decision here is to pick the outperforming stocks and avoid the underperforming ones.
another great interview of @danielgross and @natfriedman by @benthompson
Some notes from the interview:
on Japan:
"...We’ve been puzzled by why TSMC’s margins aren’t better for a little while. Why are they not taking more of the margin? And I think you just said it, they’ve been through so many rounds of boom and bust and they’ve outlived a lot of people who made the wrong moves."
...I find a really interesting mispriced thing in the world might be Japan, the entire country.
...if you’re trying to consolidate all your bets on semiconductors, Japan’s a pretty interesting geography, because I think they’re going to have all these components at the end of the day, in basically one single country.
...What I sort of wonder is in a world where, if AI really happens, maybe the 2030s are the decade of Japan, if they really are able to manufacture all of these components that have to get offshore from Taiwan for various reasons."
"Don't bet against Zuck"
On Gemini:
"...not only did they deliver a good model, but they delivered innovation along an axis, a couple orders of magnitude out from what anyone else had delivered so far
...it’s clear that Google has figured something out here, and they have a bit of a secret and we’ve all been looking for clues and poring over the literature to figure out what it is. But this is a real axis of differentiation."
Imagine opening Amazon’s earnings report 5 years from now and what do you think you might hope you paid more attention to? It’s very unlikely to be AWS topline growth rate this (or any) quarter.
If I have to guess, it’s the shipping+ fulfillment costs related developments that you would find more consequential 5 years from now.
I’ll explain why but let’s first take a look at some numbers quickly before going back to that discussion.
3P revenue grew by almost +20%, ads +25%, subscription mid-teen, and 1P MSD+.
AWS, which was the key focus for many, grew by ~12%. More on AWS later; let’s start more segment level discussion with Amazon, ex AWS.
Thread on $META follow-up call and some more thoughts on the quarter
Meta's DAU/MAU is at all-time high. Consumers vote with their time whereas "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class remains busy dissecting "surveillance capitalism"
chart h/t @east_cap
it seems the impact from the war so far has been minimal, and the wider 4Q revenue guide was likely just out of caution.
Meta had a terrific third quarter which makes the after-hours reaction (down ~3%) tad bit surprising, but perhaps understandable given the wider range of scenarios for advertising going forward.
Here are my highlights from tonight’s call.
Since 4Q’19, Meta added 880 Mn Daily Active Users/People (DAU/DAP) to its Family of Apps (FOA) properties.
Given Snap currently has 406 mn DAU, this means Meta added two “Snap” (and then some) in less than four years!!
DAU/MAU engagement looks steady across all regions. Overall DAU/MAU ratio has been inching up for the last seven consecutive quarters.