Meta Maintains Long-Term Focus

Meta, owner of Facebook, reported a 2% rise in revenue (on a constant currency basis) to 27.7 billion US dollars for the third quarter. Meta flagged "weak advertising demand, which we believe continues to be impacted by the uncertain and volatile macroeconomic landscape."

CEO Mark Zuckerberg described messaging as a "major monetisation opportunity." He said one of Meta's fastest growing products is Click-to-Messaging ads, which let businesses run ads on Facebook and Instagram that start a thread on Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram Direct so they can communicate with customers directly. The product generates a 9 billion dollar annual run rate. "This revenue is mostly on Click-to-Messenger today since we started there first, but Click-to-WhatsApp just passed a 1.5 billion dollar run rate, growing more than 80% year-over-year."

Zuckerberg pointed to paid messaging as another opportunity. "We're putting the foundation in place now to scale this with key partnerships like Salesforce, which lets all businesses on their platform use WhatsApp as the main messaging service to answer customer questions, send updates, and sell directly in chat," he added. "We also launched JioMart on WhatsApp in India and it's our first end-to-end shopping experience that shows the potential for chat-based commerce through messaging."

Mete has just started shipping its new Quest Pro VR headset, which is designed to deliver "high-resolution mixed reality so you can blend virtual objects into the physical environment around you." 

"There are 200 million people who get new PCs every year, mostly for work," Zuckerberg added. "Our goal for the Quest Pro line over the next several years is to enable more and more of these people to get their work done in virtual and mixed reality, eventually even better than they could on PCs....There's still a long road ahead to build the next computing platform, but we are clearly doing leading work here. This is a massive undertaking and it’s often going to take a few versions of each product before they become mainstream. But I think our work is going to be of historic importance and create  the foundation for an entirely new way that we will interact with each other and blend technology into our lives." Source: Meta statement