In his call for quarterly results On Wednesday, April 27, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the direction of the company, even though the company fell short of its earnings per share target.
Meta, which has met its revenue and new user targets, plans to slow the pace of some investments due to current growth levels.
Zuckerberg addressed some of the challenges facing Meta in a Facebook post on the same day, including the switch to short video, which he acknowledged “isn’t monetizing as well right now, but which we’re pretty bullish on in the long run.”
Other issues affecting the company include signal loss due to Apple’s iOS changes, slowing e-commerce growth and the war in Ukraine, Zuckerberg said.
Video, ads and the metaverse will drive growth
Last year, Meta split its business into two categories: App Family, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, and reality labswhich focuses on building the social media platform of the future.
Zuckerberg says in his Facebook post:
“Over the next few years, our goal from a financial perspective is to generate sufficient operating income growth from Family of Apps to fund investment growth in Reality Labs while increasing our overall profitability,”
Meta plans to use three main investment priorities to drive this growth: Reels, Ads, and Metaverse.
AI video recommendations seek to increase value for users
Reels, which launched globally in February 2022, is Meta’s shorthand video feature created to rival TikTok. Meta plans to capitalize on the growing popularity of video content by improving AI recommendations.
Zuckerberg says:
“Reels already account for over 20% of the time people spend on Instagram. Overall, video accounts for 50% of the time people spend on Facebook, and Reels is growing rapidly there as well.
We’re also seeing a major shift in feeds, from being almost exclusively curated by your social graph or follower graph to more of your AI recommended feed, even if the content hasn’t was posted by a friend or someone you follow.
Meta’s AI advancements aim to make it a discovery engine that will show users valuable and relevant content shared across company properties.
Meta Building a New Platform Around Virtual and Augmented Reality
Zuckerberg also discussed Meta’s plans to launch a new social media platform known as Horizon later this year.
“(Horizon) will make it easy for people to access metaverse experiences from many more platforms, even without the need for a headset,” Zuckerberg said.
This platform will work with virtual reality platforms such as Quest, owned by Meta, and will offer both recreational activities such as games and work use cases.
“Making this available everywhere means you can interact with anyone on any device or platform they want to use,” Zuckerberg said.
“Our other goal for Horizon is to grow the metaverse economy and help creators make a living working in the metaverse. We expect to be significantly better at monetization than others in the space, and we believe this should become a lasting benefit for our platforms as they grow.
Featured image: marysuperstudio/Shutterstock
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