“Meta Platforms earns more revenue than expected, signaling recovery in digital advertising market”

Quarterly revenue increased 3 percent year over year to $28.6 billion. For the second quarter, Meta even expects a further improvement to a possible USD 32 billion. Both figures are much stronger than experts widely believed possible and Meta shares advanced as much as 11 percent in aftermarket trading on Wall Street on Wednesday.

Analysts feared disappointing numbers. Meta reported in March that it would cut another 10,000 extra jobs to save costs. In November, the company had already said that 11,000 jobs would be lost. Meta made these interventions precisely because of a slowdown in advertising demand. Large rounds of redundancies in quick succession are often also a sign that things are not going well for a company.

However, Meta now seems to benefit from the fact that the digital advertising market is shifting to proven platforms such as Facebook and Instagram in these economically uncertain times. Many companies prefer to spend their advertising budgets on advertising via Facebook and Instagram rather than trying something new in another way.

Facebook’s net profit fell by almost a quarter to $ 5.7 billion. But analysts had already more or less factored in such a sharp fall in profits, in fact they had counted on a worse result.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg also points out that the number of users of Facebook, or the “community” as he calls it, continues to grow. The number of daily active users on Facebook has now exceeded 2 billion.

That means that roughly a quarter of the world’s population logs on to the site every day. For all Meta services, in addition to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, there are just over 3 billion daily active users.