in that Quarterly earnings call On Wednesday, April 27, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the company’s direction, even though the company missed its earnings per share target.
Meta, which 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 the Meta in a dossier Facebook share On the same day, including the transition to the short video, which he acknowledged “isn’t monetizing either at the moment, but we’re very optimistic about it in the long run.”
Zuckerberg said other issues affecting the company include signal loss from Apple’s changes to iOS, slowing e-commerce growth and the war in Ukraine.
Video, Ads and Metaverse will drive growth
Last year, Meta divided its business into two categories: the family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and reality labswhich is focused on building the social media platform of the future.
Zuckerberg says in a Facebook post:
“Over the next several years, our goal from a financial perspective is to generate enough operating income growth from Family of Apps to fund the growth of the Reality Labs investment while continuing to increase our overall profitability,”
Meta plans to use three main investment priorities to drive this growth: reels, ads, and the metaverse.
AI video recommendations seek to increase value for users
Launched globally in February 2022, Reels is a short Meta video feature built to rival TikTok. Meta plans to capitalize on the growing popularity of video content by enhancing its AI recommendations.
Zuckerberg says:
“Reels already make up over 20% of the time people spend on Instagram. Video in general makes up 50% of the time people spend on Facebook, and Reels is growing rapidly there as well.
We’re also seeing a huge shift in feeds from being organized almost exclusively by social graph or graph tracking to now having more of your feed recommended by AI, even if the content isn’t posted by a friend or someone you follow.”
Meta’s advances in AI are intended to make it a discovery engine that shows users valuable and relevant content shared across the company’s properties.
Meta Build 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 easier for people to get into metaverse experiences from many platforms, even without needing a headset,” Zuckerberg said.
This platform will work with virtual reality platforms such as Meta-owned Quest and feature entertainment activities such as gaming and business 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 focus for Horizon is building the metaverse economy and helping creators make a living working in the metaverse. We expect to be meaningfully better at monetizing than others in the space, and we believe that should become a sustainable advantage for our platforms as they evolve.”
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