Facebook (Meta; whatever) Loses 25% of Their Value
This is the sort of story you love to see. From Deepa Seetharaman and Salvador Rodriguez at The Wall Street Journal (via Apple News+):
Meta shares plunged after the results were announced, dropping more than 20%. If shares dropped that much when trading opens on Thursday, it would wipe more than $175 billion from the tech giant’s market capitalization.
Quick update: the Journal’s story was published on the evening of Facebook’s report, before the market opened the next day. They ended up dropping slightly more than 25%, and they lost over $200B.
The company said it expected revenue growth to slow because users were spending less time on its more lucrative services. Meta cited inflation as a weight on advertiser spending and estimated that ad-tracking changes introduced by Apple Inc. last year would cost Meta some $10 billion this year.
I bet Apple is happy about this. And they certainly should be. Their App Tracking Transparency policy wasn’t designed to cripple Mark Zuckerberg’s company, it was designed to give users a little more control over their data and prevent unwanted tracking. Facebook blaming Apple for the loss would be like a peeping tom blaming his victim for his blue balls when they finally close the curtains of the window he’s looking through. Merlin Mann put it well on Twitter (quipping about a particularly stupid framing of the issue by the New York Times):
“Local burglar blames revenue shortfall on industry-hostile doors.”
From the Journal again:
Meta also lost about a million daily users globally and stagnated in the U.S. and Canada, two of the company’s most profitable markets, the results show.
The fact that they’re losing users is a good sign, but it it shouldn’t take Facebook by surprise unless they’re so high on their own supply that they've completely isolated themselves in echo chambers reaffirming how much good they’re doing in the world (probably by means of Facebook groups). The global social media market is saturated, this plateauing shouldn’t come as a surprise, and Facebook acting like this caught them off guard is bullshit. They clearly did see it coming because they decided to refocus the whole business on personal porn theaters virtual reality goggles. We’ll see how that goes, but here’s to the next Google Glass.
I must say though, it pisses me off that Wall Street is gonna get the credit for finally dealing a significant blow to Facebook when those of us who have been paying attention have been screaming about how terrible they are for years. Fuck capitalism, fuck Facebook.