[AmericanThinker] Facebook earnings came in below expectations for the fourth quarter, and the company said numerous challenges are ahead in the first quarter.Inflation, supply chain disruptions at advertisers and users shifting to products that "monetize at lower rates" are among the key issues the company faces.
Revenue in the first quarter will be between $27 billion and $29 billion, while analysts were looking for that number to top $30 billion.
Facebook shares tumbled more than 20% in extended trading on Wednesday after the company reported disappointing earnings, gave weak guidance and said user growth has stagnated.
For the schadenfreude-minded, it's expected to take the largest one-day loss in all U.S. corporate history, with some $200 billion likely to be wiped off the company's valuation in the course of trading today.
Heckuva job, Markie.
And yes, the key data point is that they are losing people:
Daily Active Users (DAUs): 1.93 billion vs 1.95 billion expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount
Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 2.91 billion vs 2.95 billion expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount
That's more than a million users, which marks the first time the company's user base has ever contracted. Like California, more people are leaving than coming. No new people, no new earnings growth.
Facebook's pals in Big Tech are going down, too. Seems no one is all-powerful anymore.
The company, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, blamed everyone but themselves for the company's bad news. Zuckerberg said it was the allure of TikTok, the Chinese spyware company that serves as a forum for lunatic left-wingery, and its apparently addictive quality to teenagers.
Other Facebook execs blamed those bastards at Apple, who instituted a revised iOS privacy policy that prevents Facebook from harvesting users' data without their express consent. Some analysts blamed the astroturf "whistleblower" featured on 60 Minutes and in testimony to Congress that Facebook knew that its Instagram app was bad for teenagers' self-esteem, which was old news when it came out. All of this could be at least partially true.
Other reasons might carry some water, too — that the company has grown as big as it can grow globally; that the users want something new, meaning Facebook is becoming the new MySpace; and that Facebook has built two huge new headquarters of "perfection," which, according to Parkinson's Law of Buildings, is a sign of an entity in decline.
The elephant in the room of these analyses, though, is the same one that's driving people out of California: that customers are disgusted with Facebook's politicized behavior.
Get woke, go broke. It applies even to the big boys.
In Facebook's case, that behavior has taken on approximately three pernicious forms.
One, the data-harvesting, and data-mining on users, in order to "nudge" and influence them. Plenty of people don't like that even for commercial purposes, but the fact that Facebook moved in a political direction is especially obnoxious.
Facebook has hired lots of Democrat party operatives, presumably to lobby Washington, but just as likely to manipulate Facebook's users into voting "Democrat" through the miracle of algorithms. Facebook, see, knows you better than you know yourself, based on all its data-harvesting. That doesn't sit well with many users, and as word gets out about it, some users are packing up.
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