Research archive for META

I'm highly annoyed by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges against Facebook. In fact, I'm outraged. Maybe I should make a Blunders episode about this issue!?

Last week Facebook released third quarter results which comfortably beat expectations. In fact, this was the largest Dollar beat in their history. Revenues grew by $3.8bn to $21.2bn. Expectations were for $19.5bn. Earnings were also well ahead of expectations. They made $2.71 per share versus expectations of $1.90. This represented 28% growth form this quarter last year.

According to news reports, yesterday was Instagram's 10th birthday. In case you forgot, Instagram was acquired by the Facebook group just two years after it was founded. So it's been in the fold for the last eight years.

Facebook have teamed up with Ray-Ban to make smart glasses. You may feel like you have seen this movie before? That is because you have. A similar collaboration was announced between Google Glass and Luxottica (maker of Ray-Bans and many others) a few years ago. Unfortunately, Google Glasses never really took off and got scrapped.

Political activists have been moaning about Facebook, accusing them of not removing content on the platform that they find offensive. They also accuse the company of not doing enough to promote [insert your favourite cause here] or combat [insert the name of your best enemy here].

Facebook came out with its quarterly numbers yesterday after-market. They hammered expectations on both revenues and earnings, notwithstanding the fact that we are in the middle of a pandemic. The social media giant said user engagement increased, as measured by what they call family daily active people, which is the number of people who use one of their major apps every day.

WhatsApp is a beast. It is definitely the "social network" that I use the most. Some people may question it being a social network but if you think about, all your little groups are mini, private networks in your life that share loads of content, ideas, news and sometimes (mostly) utter garbage.

Facebook was founded 14 years ago in a dorm room of a Harvard student. Today it has over 2.5 billion active users. That is nearly half of all the adults on earth. The kind of power and influence of social media is unprecedented to the human race. We have never dealt with anything like this before and we are learning as we go. That applies to the regulators, the users and the social media organisations. What makes it even more complicated is that social media sites have no borders. This is a truly global phenomenon.

We recommend Facebook shares to holders of accounts with us in New York. Not everyone seems to love this company, as they do attract a bit of negative attention from time to time. Facebook users tend to be older and prone to circulating conspiracy theories. The site also carries a lot of political advertising, which gets people steamed up. Their other main platform is Instagram, which is full of attractive influencers getting up to no good. Mark Zuckerberg is controversial, and so on.

Facebook is coming in hot for online shopping. Adverts are by far their biggest revenue stream but it makes good sense for consumers to just buy the goods advertised straight through the platform.

​According to a report by Axios, Facebook is said to be buying the GIF-making and sharing platform Giphy for $400 million, with plans to integrate the GIF repository into Instagram and other apps that Facebook owns. Giphy is by far one of the biggest GIF repositories on the internet today which helps offer tools to create, share and remix GIFs.

Last week Facebook released Q1 results which comfortably beat expectations. Revenues grew by 18% versus this time last year. Expectations were for 13% growth. As we have spoken about before, Facebook user engagement should increase nicely during the global shutdown but advertising spend will drop. Advertising is 98.3% of all their revenues.

What about Facebook? How is it doing on planet Covid-19? There are currently 311 Vestact clients who own Facebook shares in their New York portfolios. The aggregate value of those holding is $10 207 448.

I think that Facebook's Libra will be a game changer for the international payments space, and by extension entrench the Facebook platform in all or our lives. The first step though is to stop calling it Facebook's cryptocurrency. In reality, Facebook initiated the concept but when it comes to control of the new currency, they don't have any more say than other member companies.

The worlds most popular messaging app, WhatsApp revealed how massive it has become since starting 11 years ago. The Facebook owned app hit 2 billion users, up from 1.5 billion 2 years ago. The mother company Facebook, which recently hit 2.5 billion users, is the only other platform with over 2 billion users.