In its Quarterly Earnings Conference Call On Wednesday, April 27, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the direction of the company, even though the company missed its EPS target.
Meta met its revenue and new user goals and plans to slow down some of its investments due to the current level of growth.
Zuckerberg addresses some of Meta’s challenges facebook post On the same day, including the transition to short videos, he admitted that “it’s not very monetized right now, but we’re very optimistic about it in the long run.”
Other issues affecting the company include Apple’s iOS changesslowing e-commerce growth and the war in Ukraine, Zuckerberg said.
Video, advertising and Metaverse will drive growth
Last year, Meta divided its business into two categories: a family of apps, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, and reality labfocused on building the social media platform of the future.
Zuckerberg said in his Facebook post:
“Over the next few years, from a financial standpoint, our goal is to generate sufficient operating income growth from the application family to fund the growth of Reality Labs’ investments while continuing to improve our overall profitability,”
Meta plans to use three main investment priorities to drive this growth: Reels, Advertising, and Metaverse.
AI video recommendation aims to add value to users
Launching globally in February 2022, Reels is a short video feature created by Meta to compete with TikTok. Meta plans to capitalize on the growing popularity of video content by enhancing AI recommendations.
Zuckerberg said:
“Reels already account for more than 20% of the time people spend on Instagram. Video overall accounts for 50% of the time people spend on Facebook, and Reels are growing fast there as well.
We’ve also seen feeds go from being almost entirely curated by your social graph or following graph to now more AI-recommended feeds, even if the content isn’t posted by friends or people you follow. “
Meta’s advancements in artificial intelligence are designed to make it a discovery engine that exposes users to valuable and relevant content shared by a company’s assets.
Meta builds new platform around virtual and augmented reality
Zuckerberg also discussed Meta’s plans to launch a new social media platform called Horizon later this year.
“(Horizon) will make it easy for people to enter the metaverse experience from more platforms, even without the need for a headset,” Zuckerberg said.
The platform will work with virtual reality platforms like Meta-owned Quest and provide entertainment and work use cases like gaming.
“Making this ubiquitous means you can interact with anyone on any device or platform they want to use,” Zuckerberg said.
“Another focus we have with Horizon is building virtual world economies and helping creators make a living in virtual worlds. We want to do a better job of monetizing than others in this space, and we think as the platform grows development, which should be a sustainable advantage of our platform.”
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