This is almost wholly driven by advertising revenue ($50b of that total) and so no matter how much you may believe the AI and headset VR business is doing well, it's insigificant right now to the bottom line in revenue terms.
Once you view Meta as an advertising company, it's no different to how you would feel about google or any other advertising company you engage in. If you pay for access, you are still being sold on as eyeballs for ads, and your revenue as a paying user is not the primary revenue channel they care about: the content providers who pay for placement, are their customers and you are why the customers want to give Meta (and google) that money.
Before my Facebook account got unfairly banned for "Account integrity issues", It was grating how Facebook was just full of ads. You scroll - ads, you watch a video - ads, you view people's stories - ads.
No wonder they keep wanting more data for targeted ads.
I've heard it said that Meta is the best platform for targeted ads. That's it an Ad factory. I don't know if it's true, but considering the amount of data they collect, it might be true.
https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45752570)
This is almost wholly driven by advertising revenue ($50b of that total) and so no matter how much you may believe the AI and headset VR business is doing well, it's insigificant right now to the bottom line in revenue terms.
Once you view Meta as an advertising company, it's no different to how you would feel about google or any other advertising company you engage in. If you pay for access, you are still being sold on as eyeballs for ads, and your revenue as a paying user is not the primary revenue channel they care about: the content providers who pay for placement, are their customers and you are why the customers want to give Meta (and google) that money.
Before my Facebook account got unfairly banned for "Account integrity issues", It was grating how Facebook was just full of ads. You scroll - ads, you watch a video - ads, you view people's stories - ads.
No wonder they keep wanting more data for targeted ads.
I've heard it said that Meta is the best platform for targeted ads. That's it an Ad factory. I don't know if it's true, but considering the amount of data they collect, it might be true.