Facebook Inc.

[Behappyalways]

TikTok has established itself as one of the top online platforms for U.S. teens, while the share of teens who use Facebook has fallen sharply

Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/202...logy-2022/

[CY09]

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapor...et-2999176

Interesting scam article.

If one is interested to know, Facebook has a side project which is meant for online dating similar to Tinder and CMB etc. However, due to its poor QC and that creating a facebook account is easy, what has resulted is that it has become a hotbed for love scams with fake profile pictures asking for a small amount upfront before escalating to larger numbers.

In a way, the scamming community has helped to improve the user activeness and number of facebook accounts (sacarsm intended).

Anyway instagram is a dying breed, tiktok and bytedance are the new model for business advertising

[Wildreamz]

..

Anyway instagram is a dying breed, tiktok and bytedance are the new model for business advertising

For now. To be honest, given geopolitical tension, and reputation of the CCP, I do not think that TikTok has much legs globally, outside of China either. 

Youtube on the other hand is probably here to stay: https://www.engadget.com/youtube-revenue...37275.html

For example, Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTuber known as Mr. Beast, shared earlier this year that he had made just $15,000 from TikTok despite more than a billion views in the app.

(vested in Google)

[weijian]

I think the publicly traded share price of Meta has already disciplined Mark Zuckerberg to a certain extent. Since there is no way shareholders can get the founder off the organization, the below "unsolicited advice" will probably fall on deaf ears.

Time to Get Fit — an Open Letter from Altimeter to Mark Zuckerberg (and the Meta Board of Directors)

To accomplish this goal, we recommend a three step plan that will double FCF to $40 B per year and focus the company’s teams and investments:

Reduce headcount expense by at least 20%;
Reduce annual capex by at least $5 B from $30B to $25B; and
Limit investment in metaverse / Reality Labs to no more than $5B per year.

https://medium.com/@alt.cap/time-to-get-...2d94e80a18

[Wildreamz]

Meta shares plummet alongside billion-dollar losses in metaverse division
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2...ook-stocks

Report: Meta’s Horizon Worlds only has 200k active users
https://musically.com/2022/10/17/metas-h...ive-users/

---

I have written extensively on Meta (https://www.valuebuddies.com/thread-1649...#pid164054), and I don't want to beat the dead horse. But I repeat: Mark Zuckerberg does not understand the Metaverse, or what users want. And there is no one in Meta that can stop him, not anyone on the board, because of his >50% voting rights.

I am not sure if Meta is a good short here, because I do not know the extend and time frame of it's downfall. But his Metaverse side-project is doomed to a spectacular failure. 

(ex-investor)

[weijian]

Well, there is a lot to unpack from Prof Aswath's blog post on Facebook (or Meta) here.

But one thing I find interesting is this "Management Mismatches across the Life Cycle". If we look at Big Tech, most of them (the biggest ones like Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple) have moved on from their founders as they (or their founders) are at a different life cycle now. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is the singular outlier here. Of course, he may beat the odds (yes, history shows that the odds are against him but he has beaten the odds with just the fact that he bought FB from zero to 100 billion) but as Morgan Housel says - what makes u successful, doesn't necessarily keeps u successful.

META Lesson 1: Corporate Governance

Much as we would like to blame others for our misfortunes, the truth is that get the corporate governance we deserve. Most of us, as investors, chose to give away our voting rights willingly because we wanted shares of the "next big thing", and at the time we did so, we rationalized it by arguing it that we would not need that voting power any time soon.

https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/202...nance.html

[EnSabahNur]

Meta is exploring a decentralised, Twitter alternative.


https://www.platformer.news/p/meta-is-bu...entralized

[EnSabahNur]

More details on Meta's app to compete with Twitter

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/19/23730...titor-leak

[EnSabahNur]

I don't know if this will return a positive ROI, but it sure looks impressive.

https://bgr.com/tech/lex-fridman-intervi...metaverse/