Facebook parent Meta Platforms reported its largest quarterly revenue since going public more than a decade ago as demand for advertising picked up and the company continued to reap the benefits of cutting costs and developing new AI technology.
The Wall Street Journal reports Meta’s sales increased to $34.1 billion, up more than 23% compared with a year ago. That represents Meta’s third quarter in a row of rising revenue after the company saw its business shrink for most of 2022. The 23% increase is Meta’s largest year-to-year growth in revenue since the third quarter of 2021.
The company’s fortunes have begun to turn around during what Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has called a “year of efficiency.” Investors have been encouraged by improvements to the company’s ad-targeting capabilities and advancements in artificial intelligence. Its turnaround in advertising has been a crucial factor in its rebound after Apple in 2021 implemented privacy changes that erased $10 billion of revenue for Meta in 2022.
AI will be Meta’s biggest investment area in 2024 in terms of engineering and computing resources, Zuckerberg said. To avoid allocating a lot of new employees, the company will deprioritize a number of non-AI projects and shift people toward working on AI endeavors, he added.
Advertising made up 98.5% of Meta’s revenue in the quarter. The company’s advertising revenue rose to $33.6 billion. Meta said its average ad price fell 6% year over year. In the same quarter last year, the average price per ad decreased by 18%.
Meta reported that Facebook’s daily-active-user base increased to 2.09 billion users, up from 2.06 billion the previous quarter. Analysts were expecting the company to report a daily-user base of 2.07 billion for the quarter.
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