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Meta’s Facebook Reports 3.03 Billion Monthly Active Users in Q2 2023, Posts Strong Rise in Advertising Revenue
Facebook parent Meta on Wednesday beat market expectations for quarterly earnings, powered by a reviving digital ad business.
Meta reported a profit of $7.8 billion (roughly Rs. 63,949 crore) on $32 billion (roughly Rs. 2,62,358 crore) in revenue during the recently ended quarter, as the number of people using Facebook monthly rose to 3.03 billion.
“We had a good quarter,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call.
“We continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap I’ve seen in a while…”
Meta had suffered a rough 2022 amid a souring economic climate, which forced advertisers to cut back on spending, and Apple’s data privacy changes, which allowed users to block ad targeting, the pillar of Meta’s business.
But like the other big US tech companies, Meta’s share price has had a stellar 2023 that Zuckerberg in January said would be the “year of efficiency”.
“With two straight quarters of positive revenue growth and the first quarter of double-digit revenue growth since late 2021, Meta’s year of efficiency is off to a strong start,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Debra Aho Williamson.
“There’s a lot to feel good about when it comes to Meta right now,” Williamson added.
Meta shares were up more than seven percent $320.32 (roughly Rs. 26,262) in after-market trades.
In its earnings release, the company said that the number of ads on its various applications rose by 34 percent year-on-year in the second quarter.
Analysts noted the greater interest from advertisers in Reels, the video format copied from TikTok, and a less gloomy economic context conducive to marketing spending.
Meta is seeing “good progress” in bringing in money from Reels, with the video snippets played more than 200 billion times daily across Facebook and Instagram, Zuckerberg said.
VR costs
Meta’s vow of austerity on spending brought an unprecedented round of cost-cutting that has seen the company lay off tens of thousands of workers since last November.
Meta said it had 71,469 employees at the end of June, a decrease of 14 percent from the same time a year earlier.
The company has faced criticism over its gamble on the metaverse, the world of virtual reality that Meta believes will be the next frontier online and led it to change its name from Facebook in 2021.
This to date has proved to be a bad bet with customers so far unenthused by the technology, even though Apple will enter the space sometime next year with the release of its expensive VisionPro headset.
Zuckerberg referred to the lackluster rate at which people are embracing the metaverse as a “somewhat sobering signal” but he remained confident it is a computing platform of the future.
The metaverse and AI remain priorities at Meta, according to Zuckerberg.
Meta said in the earnings report that it expects its operating losses at the unit responsible for VR to “increase meaningfully” in the year ahead.
The company has also jumped to take advantage of the chaos at Twitter, which has now been renamed to X.
Earlier this month Meta rushed out the release of Threads, a text-only app that saw more than 100 million downloads in just days, though the users’ longterm interest remains unproven.
“We saw unprecedented growth out of the gate and, more importantly, we’re seeing more people coming back daily than I’d expected,” Zuckerberg said of Threads.
“Now we’re focused on retention and improving the basics; I’m really happy with the path that we’re on here.”
On AI, Zuckerberg has chosen a different track than Microsoft and its partnership with OpenAI.
Meta instead has endorsed a more “open source” approach and made its Llama generative AI technology available to researchers and companies to adapt to their own needs.
Investors are keen to see how Meta expands use of generative AI in its products, questions on the earnings call showed.
Zuckerberg indicated in a recent podcast that his company is working on an AI platform that would allow creators and advertisers to more efficiently work together.
Samsung launched the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5 alongside the Galaxy Tab S9 series and Galaxy Watch 6 series at its first Galaxy Unpacked event in South Korea. We discuss the company’s new devices and more on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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