Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during a telephone conversation with analysts about the company’s earnings for the third quarter of 2023 last Wednesday, October 25, stated that financial injections into artificial intelligence would be a priority for the technology giant as part of its investment activities, noting that in the relevant aspect, the main issues would be material support for development engineering and computing resources.
The head of Meta also said that the company’s advertising business and the line of apps included in its digital ecosystem have received an incentive to grow. At the same time, the firm is currently looking for options for integrating artificial intelligence technologies into Ads Manager. Also, at the modern stage of activity for Meta, one of the main tasks is to increase the level of accessibility of commerce for advertisers by optimizing images and text materials published on the company’s platforms.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s statements about the priorities of the technology giant for the near future make it clear unequivocally and clearly that the firm plans to exclude from the list of the main directions of its efforts the work on the implementation of those projects that are not related to machine intelligence. The company strives to focus forces and attention on the process of development and introduction of advanced technologies of a new generation into its system of digital space. Next year, the technology giant will hire employees for positions that involve activities within the framework of projects related to machine intelligence.
During a conversation with analysts, the company’s CFO Susan Li, answering a question about the company’s use of artificial intelligence in the advertising business and other variants of applying AI, said that after the relevant tools become more mature, it will be integrated into Ads Manager.
This quarter, the tech giant is using machine intelligence as part of a scenario of so-called text variations. In this case, advanced technology generates different versions of advertising texts based on the semantic structures contained in the customer’s request, emphasizing the advantages of goods and services.
AI also helps the tech giant to increase the level of audience engagement. This was announced by Mark Zuckerberg. He noted that in this case, it means applying artificial intelligence to create recommendations in user multimedia feeds. According to the head of Meta, this scenario of using AI allowed to increase the amount of time spent on Facebook and Instagram by 7% and 6% respectively.
Mr. Zuckerberg said that machine intelligence tools are also a means to improve the performance of advertisers. He reported that the volume of Advantage+ trading campaigns is fixed at around $10 billion. Mark Zuckerberg also noted that the use of machine intelligence helps to reduce the level of costs for commerce and messaging.
Since the launch of Reels, the amount of time spent by users on the Instagram platform has increased by 40%. Mr. Zuckerberg said that this proposal is neutral in its pure form concerning the total revenue of the technology giant from advertising. He noted that Rells has gone through a kind of development path from an early initiative to a constituent element of the structure of the main apps existing in the space of the company’s digital ecosystem. Apps are the springboard for the implementation of long-term and most ambitious projects related to artificial intelligence.
Mark Zuckerberg and Susan Li reported that by the end of the third quarter, the number of daily active Facebook users reached 2.1 billion people, which is 5% or 101 million more than a year ago. The monthly number of those who regularly interact with the mentioned virtual platform in the period from July 1 to September 30 increased by 3% or 91 million people compared to the results recorded for the same time in 2022.
The company’s total revenue from the operation of apps for the third quarter of this year was fixed at $33.9 billion. This indicator is 24% higher than the result for the same period last year.
The tech giant’s revenue from advertising for the third quarter of this year amounted to $ 33.6 billion. This figure is 21% higher than the result of a year ago.
Susan Li stated that the growth in advertising revenue is mainly due to the effectiveness of the online commerce vertical. Also, according to her, in this case, the final result was favorably influenced by such areas as consumer goods in packaging and games. Separately, she reported that online commerce and gambling from a financial point of view showed significant growth due to the high level of spending by advertisers in China.
Other revenue in apps pantheon at the end of the last quarter amounted to $293 million. This figure is 53% higher than the result of a year ago. Susan Li said that in this case, the positive dynamic is due to the growth of revenue from the business exchange of messages in WhatsApp.
Mark Zuckerberg also stated that currently the monthly number of active users of the Threads virtual platform, launched last summer, is just under 100 million people. In addition, he spoke about testing Horizon for smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. This work is part of an effort to build a metaverse on different devices. The Reality Labs segment, which is a kind of springboard for creating a digital reality space existing within the corporate ecosystem of the technology giant, suffered an operating loss of $3.7 billion in the last quarter. At the same time, the profit in this case amounted to $210 million, which is 26% less than in the same period last year.
The tech giant’s investors reduced the company’s stock prices by about 3% after hours. This decision was made against the background of Susan Li’s statements that there is currently volatility in the macroeconomic environment and there is no certainty about the revenue trend vector.
As we have reported earlier, Meta Product Chief Says About Ability of AI Chatbots to Lure Advertisers.
