Facebook earnings gain as ad sales surge 82%; CFO is stepping down

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-gain-as-ad-sales-surge-82-2014-04-23

by Kopion • 12 years ago

72 70 12 years ago

chollida1• 12 years ago

Certainly not related to the numbers. They killed it this quarter!

They had a NON-GAAP EPS of 34C while estimates were at 24C.

That's pretty incredible considering that mobile advertising contributing about 59% of their advertising revenue. That's been the one area that analysts were worried about.

exelius• 12 years ago

It's hard to be an officer in a public company for any significant amount of time. Especially a CFO. You are personally, criminally liable for any fuck-ups your company may make, and that wears on a person. You don't see many CFOs that stick with companies for more than 5-7 years.

Undeniably they blew their numbers out of the water. And I don't think his departure has anything to do with the numbers; he's probably just tired.

camillomiller• 12 years ago

In other news Tim Cook officially saluted Peter Oppenheimer today. Apple's CFO of TEN years, Oppenheimer is retiring at the end of semptember. Cook: "He never missed a guidance in ten years. This must be a record among CFOs". :)

pbreit2• 12 years ago

And while revenue was up 72%, income nearly tripled! This is why you invest every penny you have into growing a software company and push profits out as far as possible.

ZenPro6• 12 years ago

Facebook is not a software company.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/06/29/rip-sof...

pyrrhotech4• 12 years ago

that's what they thought in 1999 too. Only works as long as your investors believe your story and are willing to keep injecting cash

robzyb• 12 years ago

What is "34C" and "24C"?

brianbreslin• 12 years ago

34 cents $0.34 , earnings per share

ghx• 12 years ago

The headline should read, "Facebook earnings gain as they insert 82% more ads".

There's got to be a point where it just gets too saturated for users, just like Myspace did. Maybe not this time?

randartie• 12 years ago

Earnings call clearly says ad impressions decreased 17%, but price to advertise has doubled.

Einstalbert• 12 years ago

As with Skype, I wait for the day when another Facebook competitor becomes ubiquitous enough to warrant switching. I am waiting for pretty much anything, so long as it has the market share with friends and family.

aaronbrethorst• 12 years ago

Well, the most obvious candidate was recently acquired by Facebook, so it might be a few more years.

encoderer• 12 years ago

Nope. Try again. They're making higher CPCs and CPMs.

ZenPro6• 12 years ago

To be fair, those figures have been disputed and also called outright fraudulent by a number of parties.

An advertiser recently had an $800,000 invoice struck off because he threatened to sue Facebook. They decided just to let it slide instead of have the public debate.

001sky2• 12 years ago

The world’s largest social network has been on an acquisition tear this year, effectively moving to transform itself into a tech portfolio company.

Interesting take on things ...

ZenPro6• 12 years ago

I fully imagine the descent will even more rapid than the rise.

When people congregate; advertisers follow seeking the staggering ROI of the early marketers on the platform.

The platform, under shareholder pressure, will accept as many ads as it can until the platform is so saturated the customers leave and the ad ROI plummets. Advertisers are normally last to arrive at the party and also late to leave...

I recently saw a photo that demonstrated Facebook has an 8/1 content ratio. For every 1 meaningful piece of content a user is subjected to 8 ads including sidebar + newsfeed. If you include the horizontal scrolling for mobile adverts it rises to 13/1.

I think this party just hit it's peak. I deleted my FB a month ago, have not really missed it and a few of my friends have followed. Anecdotal evidence admittedly but no one did it in the usual "I am out!". The deletions were more of a shrug. Personally I find that the most emphatic indictment; when people have just grown bored of your platform.

SDGT• 12 years ago

Every single week that I sit down and stare at my newrelic monitor, I think the exact same thing: "This is all going to collapse soon."

After almost two years of staring at six figure weekly revenue values on the analytics and tracking applications I've built (I obviously am not making this much), I begin to question my inherent concerns on FB's long game.

ZenPro6• 12 years ago

From a quantitative perspective I cannot fault them right now but from a qualitative perspective...something is rotten in Denmark.

Facebook is not the platform we need, it's the one we deserve right now ;-)

dismal22• 12 years ago

The collapse will not come from this, it will come when all the companies (gaming mostly) stop making money and can no longer justify spending $10-15 per install. It will all tumble quickly, but not because FB over-saturated their ecosystem with ads.

ZenPro6• 12 years ago

Just out of interest; if people do not leave due to saturation, why would gaming companies stop making money?

[EDIT: First time I have been downvoted for asking a question. Must have been offensive haha]

s3r3nity• 12 years ago

I recently saw a photo that demonstrated that Facebook has an 8/1 content ratio

I've also seen similar polls that show that what people _think_ are ads on Facebook aren't really ads per se ... just content from pages they had liked. And in general this might not hold for everyone, due to the newsfeed algorithm -- if I'm more engaged with my friends' posts than pages' posts, I tend to see more of the former than the latter (which is what happens when I visit FB.)

stormbrew3• 12 years ago

Doesn't really seem likely that shareholder pressure will make them do much of anything at all when only one shareholder (whose last name starts with Z and rhymes with iceberg) actually counts.

bertil3• 12 years ago

I have reasons to believe that Facebook earnings correspond to unstable practice: namely, both brands and games have bad metrics (i.e. uninformative) of their activity, and both are re-considering how their price fan- and user-acquisition. There is a stunning lack of understanding of social network dynamics among Facebook client companies. I have been through a lot of interviews lately, and no one to whom I talked seemed to know basic things like the Friend paradox, avalanche thresholds, or that the first fans are naturally more engaged -- Facebook ad purchase interface doesn’t really help either.

Nothing about game session duration, rhythm? Nothing about the thousands of odd Pakistani accounts liking the page of random family restaurants in the North of Ireland?

Some people at Facebook know those very well, but as far as I can tell, no one has connected that issue with a Wil-E-Coyote moment: strong sales out of momentum, filling an inflated inventory but widespread skepticism. There is indeed far more ads in the Facebook mobile thread, but almost exclusively for miss-targeted offers (I recently moved to a different country, twice, and I keep seeing things for local apps in a city 2,400 miles away) and for mobile games with Zynga-like gameplay: pay or… well, you can pay too.

I’m not sure Facebook is aware of that; I am sure however that Zynga wasn’t, or at least that the people in charge of the financial stability of the company dealt with that issue in an unethical manner. Seeing both a trend and someone to chosen to reinforce it scares me.

KaoruAoiShiho• 12 years ago

Is this what you're talking about?

http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4270

rajacombinator• 12 years ago

yea I'm curious about "avalanche thresholds" and how it is a basic thing people should know about. (seems like gobbledegook from my outsider perspective.)

prostoalex4• 12 years ago

59% of their advertising revenue is off mobile, where their main products are app installs and click-through ads.

They don't break it down, but an ad product boosting likes to a business page that you're describing as highly susceptible to fraud is probably not a best-seller, and isn't even offered on mobile.

bertil3• 12 years ago

Those are two distinct manifestation of potentially different issues.

Mobile is over-invested because there is a presumption of high user value that isn’t adjusted with history.

Organised click-farms use non-commercial links to avoid detection. There is a lot to be said about Facebook detection technology there.

pyrrhotech4• 12 years ago

I am short, but congrats on a great quarter! Enjoy it while it lasts. I still doubt the company will exist by 2025, but I've been wrong before so who knows.

jpeg_hero• 12 years ago

That's a long time to be short.

From my trading days, I've learned the importance off only short term trades when betting against a stock.

pyrrhotech4• 12 years ago

I don't plan on shorting to $0. I went short the day after the Whatsapp announcement at $67. Originally planned to cover around $50, but may cover at any point now. They are definitely rolling and investors are enthused in the short term at least

ENGNR• 12 years ago

They've actually pulled a bait and switch on small business.

First the pages were free and great, then they started to reduce the number of people who'd see your posts (fair enough, not everyone can see every little thing)

Then they reduced the % of people seeing posts to 3% and less, and really focussed on getting those page owners to buy ads to maintain their previous view numbers.

Maybe page owners are paying for now, potentially reliant on traffic, but I don't think they're going to be happy paying forever when free alternatives will crop up again. The traffic quality is reported as being low (many mis-clicks on mobile). If the profit isn't there then business won't be able to afford to pay in the long run.

Maybe I don't want to see posts for 'Jim's oil change' every three seconds, but good content is getting cut away also making FB far more boring.

Silhouette2• 12 years ago

I don't know if I'd call it a bait and switch, because you never really knew exactly what you were getting with Facebook anyway. The kind of auction system they use is practically designed to avoid transparency (and they're obviously not alone in that among on-line ad platforms).

It always comes down to the numbers, though. If we're advertising a small business on Facebook, and it generates more in revenues from sales than it costs in customer acquisition, it's still a net win. Is it the best place we could have invested those advertising funds? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly becomes less attractive as their cost-per-whatever figures go up, and no matter how much they fudge the presentation, we still know how much we paid overall and how much revenue we got in return.

In any case, every time this comes up there are plenty of posters who have small businesses and make the above argument, but generate revenues in the 100-200% bracket, i.e., they're at least breaking even and maybe doubling their investment, but no-one's buying the private jet and yacht any time soon. It doesn't take anything shady-sounding like a bait and switch for Facebook to lose all of that business, it just takes increasing cost-per-whatever a bit more until the return on investment is no longer a safe bet. At that point, they lose to other options with either generally better returns (so you don't care about the odd few percent, because you know you're still comfortably winning overall) or a more predictable model (so you can still run it on tighter margins).

rahimnathwani• 12 years ago

Small nitpick: "generates more in revenues from sales than it costs in customer acquisition, it's still a net win"

This statement ignores the marginal cost of sales. In your oil change example I have to deduct the cost of the oil from my revenue, before I compare it with customer acquisition cost.

(Of course, attribution of new customers to particular sources is not always easy, either, particularly if you might have gotten that customer even if you had ceased to advertise.)

mrtron• 12 years ago

I think the details matter here. The bait and switch being referred to is in regards to engaging with followers, not the ad platform directly.

Businesses grew their followers on Facebook over the years with the intention of growing a user-base they could engage with. Now a substantially lower number of your followers see content you post due to algorithm changes. The way to increase your reach to your followers is by paying for ads to basically recapture the engagement you were once getting free.

It would be like if Twitter started charging businesses to display tweets to their own followers.

dchuk2• 12 years ago

Facebook has a pattern of opening the flood gates on new features to gain massive adoption and then closing those flood gates so they can profit from them. Not necessarily an "evil" move on their part, though it is annoying.

Remember when apps came out and developers could spam the crap out of their user's walls and message all their user's friends? They let that slide for a while, probably to watch how people adopted the platform, then locked it down once they themselves had locked down tons of app developers on their platform.

Likewise with ads initially. You could get away with basically anything at first, running iffy ads to iffy landing pages, cloaking, buying cheap ass likes for fan pages you could then drop affiliate offers onto. They let that slide for a while until marketers became dependent on their platform, then yanked the rug out from under them and made it much harder to get away with any of that stuff.

prostoalex4• 12 years ago

This is a natural progression in any social network as people friend more people and follow more pages.

If you go from a time point when there were 3 television channels to a point where there are 500, have the original 3 channels pulled a bait-and-switch on you by promising "national audience"?

thesis• 12 years ago

What? Apples and oranges. More people watching TV means more people wanting different things. If I like something on FB, I don't want FB deciding for me if I want to see it.

brokentone2• 12 years ago

What free alternatives will crop up? They have the critical mass of userbase. There is no advantage for a user to go to a place that has freer promotional space, in fact, there may be a disincentive there.

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

Free alternative, email. Userbase : 99,9% of the internet users.

vacri• 12 years ago

Veritasium on youtube has a couple of videos breaking down the numbers - not only do you have to pay to get views now, but the views delivered above and beyond what you usually get are fraudulent.

He showed the usage of his page beforehand, with users clustered in Western countries, generally 20-40% of whom interacted with his page in some way. After paying for more views, they were all from developing countries, a profile of users he'd never seen before with very little (0-1%) engagement with his page.

It's worth checking out his videos if you want more detail on the patterns he found. It's pretty clear that it's fraudulent.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g (explores problems he sees with FB as a marketing platform)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag (massive influx of unengaged developing-world pageviews)

johnvschmitt2• 12 years ago

Facebook Ads are a real shakedown scam, & getting worse.

After reading up on other's experience, I ran an experiment last week:

I started a stupid comic blog (http://omgcmon.com). I made a facebook "page" for it too.

I posted an link from my stupid comic blog to the facebook "page". I posted the same link to my personal status.

The posting didn't even show up in my OWN news feed, unless I changed it from "top stories" to "most recent". (All other posts from me, show up in my "top stories" at least.) My friends & family didn't see it either.

But, when I took the same image in the blog post, & put it in facebook as a "Photo", then people saw it, commented, liked, etc.

So, it sure does look like Facebook knows that the link was on a "page", & then used it's secret algorithm to suppress it, as it knows that will, over a large population, cause more ad dollars to be spent to boost "pages".

So, the money/profit will flow well, but not forever.

Run your own experiments if you doubt it. It's not hard to get this data yourself.

josho2• 12 years ago

This probably isn't news to you, or anyone that cares about Facebook. I was curious about your description and went to investigate, only to find out that it seems Facebook pages are completely inaccessible unless you are signed on. I recall previously being able to see company or event pages without having signed in previously.

I suppose without logging into Facebook you can't make them any money, so why bother giving you any access.

kytmizuno• 12 years ago

That's untrue. Facebook pages are accessible even when you're not logged in. This loads perfectly fine from an incognito tab: https://www.facebook.com/sears

nyrulez• 12 years ago

I don't see this is completely weird. If I was designing the news feed, I would give way more importance to personal posts (especially photos) than non personal posts, as I would like to preserve the personal nature of Facebook and not pollute it with non-personal info.

However, if a business (a non personal entity) wants to gain entry (and potentially pollute the experience to some extent), there is a price they have to pay. And that constitutes facebook's business model.

The fact that they introduced "Free" business pages which allowed free entry to people's news feeds before ads has skewed the perception of their intentions. But if I were to design it from scratch today, my design would probably be somewhat similar.

johnvschmitt2• 12 years ago

Good point. Yes, let's prioritize personal things on a personal platform.

However, ~30% of the "top stories" in my newsfeed (anecdotal of course) are public URL's that my friends share. And, those don't look like ads or promoted posts, but they sure could be!

That said, in the past, we'd promote a business by trying to get email signups, then trickle monthly updates to our users to engage them more. (That still works!) Now, email is seen as "unsexy" & we're told to go social to get viral, & make everything have a Facebook share (+pinterest/etc). That's just not as effective as email, sorry. I just wanted to share my experience about what works best for startups.

waps• 12 years ago

What I don't understand. How do these figures justify a $70 share price ? Companies tend to be valued at 15 * revenue, on large aggregate.

With these earnings their PE ratio will go from 72 to 57, assuming the stock price doesn't increase. If this stock deleverages at the same speed as google stock did, over 2 years, the share price will be $35-$30 by the end of the year ...

If the pe ratio gets in line with S&P 500 "normal" pe ratio of 15 (actually more like 10-15, but recently it's been nearer 15 than 10), facebook is only worth $17 per share.

Now the default argument is "but growth", so I fit a third degree curve to their earnings. So I fit a second-degree curve to their eps (this assumes it's on an exponential growth trajectory, quite generous I would say), and at what point would their valuation become justified at standard S&P 500 ratios ? Q1 2017. This is assuming FB's exponential growth holds up. That's not as bad as I feared it would be, but still it's pretty bad.

EPS curve for facebook: 0.005 x^2 - 0.0015 x + 0.12 (x is measured in number of quarters since Q2 2012. Data from streetinsider.com)

stormbrew3• 12 years ago

If share prices were determined by a simple mathematical formula based on earnings reports, there'd be very little profit in buying and selling stocks. People (and organizations) who buy fb believe it is undervalued in the long run. They may be wrong or they may be right, but you can't math that perception out of existence.

lutusp2• 12 years ago

The tl;dr: anyone who thinks equity valuations are based on rational decision-making are going to be taken to the cleaners.

gcb02• 12 years ago

i sent a link over their newly acquired IM service... and now all my ads are for the company owning that link.

for one side I'm impressed at their speed in incorporating that new window into my privacy. ...or maybe the selling price was so high because that was already a feature? anyway, on the other hand, I'm unimpressed by either their inventory of ads or ability to classify the content they know i know.

if they showed me things relevant to that link it would be interesting. they just flooded me with ads for something i might even own already. its like the cheap ad networks on desktop. see one item at amazon, now all sites in the world will show you that item. they just spent billions to race the mobile ads to the bottom from the get go.

Encosia• 12 years ago

Isn't it more likely that the page you visited to get the link had a Facebook "like" button on it that tracked your potential interest at that point?

gcb02• 12 years ago

nope. typed it on my phone. it was a service i use 2 months ago and a friend asked me about it during the chat

Facebook earnings gain as ad sales surge 82%; CFO is stepping down

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