The advertising business of the Facebook group Meta is running at full speed again. Sales in the last quarter rose by 23 percent year-on-year to 34.1 billion dollars (32.3 billion euros), as Meta announced after the US stock market closed on Wednesday. The bottom line is that profits jumped from $4.4 billion a year ago to $11.6 billion.
At the same time, the group continues to spend a lot of money on the development of virtual worlds and the devices for them. Reality Labs’ operating loss rose to $3.74 billion from $3.67 billion a year earlier. At the same time, the division’s sales fell from $285 to $210 million.
Investors had repeatedly expressed concern that Meta was spending too much money on a technology with uncertain profit prospects. The doubts grew stronger in the last quarter as the online advertising business slowed overall. Founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg had already confirmed back then that he saw the future in the metaverse and would therefore keep investments high.
The Meta share temporarily rose by a good two percent in after-hours trading. Sales exceeded analysts’ expectations.
Twitter alternative Threads has almost 100 million users
After three months, the Twitter alternative Threads has almost 100 million users who are active at least once a month. Meta’s founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the number when presenting the business figures for the past quarter on Wednesday.
Until now, all that was known about the development of Threads was that the service reached 100 million registrations within a few days. Afterwards, web analytics firms estimated that the number of daily active users and the time they spent on the platform declined. Zuckerberg did not provide any information on the number of daily active users on Wednesday.
He has long thought that there should be a platform for public discourse with a billion users “that is more positive,” said Zuckerberg, taking a swipe at the top dog Twitter, which was bought by tech billionaire Elon Musk and renamed X. “And if we stick with it for a few years, I think we can realize our vision.”
Since Musk took over Twitter, several services have tried to offer dissatisfied users of the most famous short message platform a new home. Threads is docked to Meta’s photo and video service Instagram and can therefore rely on existing connections between hundreds of millions of users.
The service has not yet launched in the EU – the company refers to European digital laws as justification. According to observers, the automatic linking of user data from Instagram and Threads Meta could cause problems.
