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Q1 2017 analyst estimates
EPS: $1.12 per share (FactSet) and $1.16 per share (Estimize) vs $0.77 a year ago
Revenue: $7.83 billion (FactSet) and $7.94 billion (Estimize) vs $5.382 billion a year ago
MAUs: 1.89 billion vs 1.65 billion a year ago (would be 14.55% user growth)
Mobile MAUs: ? vs 1.51 billion a year ago
EPS: $1.04 vs. expectations of $0.87 cents (Thomson Reuters), $1.12 per share (FactSet) and $1.16 per share (Estimize)
Revenue: $8.03 billion vs. expectations of $7.84 billion (Thomson Reuters), $7.83 billion (FactSet) and $7.94 billion (Estimize)
Monthly active users (MAUs): 1.94 billion vs. 1.91 billion expected by StreetAccount
Daily active users (DAUs): 1.28 billion vs. 1.26 billion expected by StreetAccount
Mobile advertising revenue -- Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 85% of advertising revenue for the first quarter of 2017, up from approximately 82% of advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2016.
The social-networking giant is talking to Hollywood studios and agencies about producing TV-quality shows with an eye toward launching original programming by late summer, people familiar with the matter said.In meetings with major talent agencies including Creative Artists Agency, United Talent Agency, William Morris Endeavor and International Creative Management Partners, Facebook has indicated it is willing to commit to production budgets as high as $3 million per episode, people familiar with the situation say.That's the price range of high-end cable-TV shows. Facebook is also interested in more moderate-cost scripted shows in the mid-to-high six-figure-per-episode range, these people say. The company will be aggressive about trying to own as much of that content as possible.
YouTube has 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users watching a ton of mobile video
Jun 22, 2017
This year at VidCon, YouTube shared some new metrics that really drive home how much it’s dominating mobile video usage and how quickly its service is gaining viewers on TVs.
The highlight was the fact that there are now 1.5 billion logged-in users visiting the site every month. The distinction is important as there are undoubtedly still quite a few folks hopping on YouTube that aren’t necessarily using Google Accounts to do so.
The site announced it hit 1 billion monthly active users in 2013, though that number assumedly related to all visitors, logged-in and not.
Logged-in users spend an average of more than one hour per day watching YouTube just on mobile devices, a pretty daunting number that showcases just how pervasive video has gotten on the mobile web.
“When we compare that [metric] to TV, people — in some countries like the U.S. — watch up to four hours per day, so we think there’s lots of room to get people to watch even more YouTube,” CEO Susan Wojcicki said onstage.
On that note, the company said that the TV screen was their fastest growing medium of consumption, noting that the category was growing 90 percent year-over-year, something that the company’s new YouTube TV service is undoubtedly going to add to. The company didn’t have any new details to share on desktop video viewing habits.
While sites like Facebook begin to throw more resources behind video efforts, it’s clear that regardless of the arbitrary “view” statistics thrown around, the sheer amount of time spent engaging with a service is a constant metric and one that YouTube has a lot to say about.
The social media company unexpectedly changed to reporting solely GAAP earnings last quarter amid the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s push to standardize earnings on the common standard, throwing investors and analysts (and journalists) for a loop. When Facebook reports second-quarter earnings after the market closes Wednesday, everyone should be more prepared for Facebook’s new standard.
Within the clearer numbers, analysts will be keeping a keen eye on Facebook’s advertising revenue as the company slows the previously rapid additions of ads to its core Newsfeed offering, which it has warned about for a year. With Facebook growth slowing, the pressure is ramping up on the company’s other properties, namely Instagram.
Instagram appears to be the main growth area for Facebook, as the company has been adding more features to Instagram (and Facebook) that are similar to features in Snap Inc.’s Snapchat app, including images that disappear after 24 hours and creative lenses. Instagram Stories especially seems popular with users, as it already surpassed Snapchat in terms of daily active users in April, with 200 million users to Snapchat’s 161 million. And it appears to be a hit with advertisers, as Morgan Stanley analysts found that Instagram was taking ad dollars from Snap and even undercutting prices in its battle with the social app.
Facebook has never disclosed Instagram’s financial performance on its own, but has been selling ads on the app since 2013. Facebook could face the same issue under new revenue-recognition rules as Alphabet Inc. does with its YouTube service, which could force it to disclose the revenue attributed to Instagram, though the timeline for doing so is likely longer than for Google and YouTube.
For now, analysts do not appear concerned about how the company will make money, thanks to the billions of people who spend time in Facebook apps. The potential for growth, which mostly counts on Instagram and other properties, will be a focus.
Earnings:
Analysts on average expects GAAP earnings of $1.12 per share, according to FactSet, up from 97 cents in the year-earlier period. The Estimize consensus is for earnings of $1.21 per share.
Facebook has beaten earnings expectations for 16 quarters in a row, though some outlets and analysts initially said the company missed expectations last quarter due to confusion around Facebook’s unannounced switch to GAAP.
Revenue:
The FactSet consensus is for revenue of $9.2 billion, up from $6.4 billion in the year-earlier period. The Estimize consensus is also for revenue of $9.2 billion.
Facebook has surpassed revenue expectations every quarter in its history expect for one, the quarter ended March 2015.
What else to look for:
Facebook’s planned deceleration did not appear to scare analysts last quarter, as they pointed to Facebook’s record of impressive growth and its wealth of other ad opportunities.
One of the most prominent ad opportunities is in video, as Facebook has been placing ads in the middle of Facebook Live videos, created a new video tab and is reportedly looking to add original content to its platform.
The company has pushed growth in video, and Shyam Patil, an analyst at Susquehanna, said his advertising checks have been strong, with “strength across the board” for ads on Facebook and on Instagram. He’s projecting advertising revenue growth of 44% year-over-year, compared with 51% in the first quarter.
In addition to Instagram, Facebook is looking for revenue from its Messenger app, which has 1.2 billion users as of April, as well as WhatsApp, which had 1.2 billion monthly active users as of February. Facebook began showing adds on Messenger on July 11 and plans to turn to WhatsApp next. But there are also content changes afoot on the main platform, which hit a milestone of two billion users in June.
Second Quarter 2017 Operational and Other Financial Highlights
Daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.32 billion on average for June 2017, an increase of 17% year-over-year.
Monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.01 billion as of June 30, 2017, an increase of 17% year-over-year.
Mobile advertising revenue – Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 87% of advertising revenue for the second quarter of 2017, up from approximately 84% of advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2016.
Capital expenditures – Capital expenditures for the second quarter of 2017 were $1.44 billion.
Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities – Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities were $35.45 billion at the end of the second quarter of 2017.
Headcount – Headcount was 20,658 as of June 30, 2017, an increase of 43% year-over-year.
New all time highs... After Hours: $168.95 : +$3.34 (+2.02%)
Despite FB's warning last November that earnings and revenue may start to slow, there's no indication that it is (yet):
- EPS of $1.32 vs $0.78 a year ago .... that's an increase of 69.23% year over year
- Revenue of $9.32 billion vs $6.44 billion a year ago .... that's an increase of 44.83% year over year
- MAUs of 2.01 billion vs 1.7 billion a year ago .... that's an increase of 18.24% year over year
- Mobile ad revenue as percentage of revenue still growing: 87% now vs 84% a year ago and 85% last quarter
Looks like they're still operating like they've been doing for the past few years now.
Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users
Information from data-security app shows company what people do on their phones beyond suite of firm’s apps
Aug. 13, 2017 7:00 a.m. ET
Months before social-media company Snap Inc. publicly disclosed slowing user growth, rival Facebook Inc. already knew.
Late last year, Facebook employees used an internal database of a sampling of mobile users’ activity to observe that usage of Snap’s flagship app, Snapchat, wasn’t growing as quickly as before, people familiar with the matter said. They saw that the shift occurred after Facebook’s Instagram app launched Stories, a near-replica of a Snapchat feature of the same name.
In February, just before going public, Snap confirmed that its user base grew more slowly in the last three months of 2016 than the prior year. Snap’s latest financial figures Thursday showed that its growth challenges persist.
Facebook’s early insight came thanks to its 2013 acquisition of Israeli mobile-analytics company Onavo, which distributes a data-security app that has been downloaded by millions of users. Data from Onavo’s app has been crucial to helping Facebook track rivals and scope out new product categories, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.
Interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Facebook’s use of Onavo data show in detail how the social-media giant employs it to measure what people do on their phones beyond Facebook’s own suite of apps. That information shapes Facebook’s product and acquisition strategy—furthering its already formidable competitive edge, the people said.
A Facebook spokesman said it is clear when people download Onavo what information it collects and how it is used. “Websites and apps have used market-research services for years,” the spokesman said, noting that the company also uses outside services to help it understand the market and improve services.
Alphabet Inc., through its Google Android operating system for smartphones, and Apple Inc. also have the ability to monitor how rivals’ apps perform on their mobile platforms, but it isn’t clear whether they use that information to shape their product road maps. Apple declined to comment. Alphabet unit Google didn’t immediately respond.
Onavo’s data comes from Onavo Protect, a free mobile app that bills itself as a way to “keep you and your data safe” by creating a virtual private network, a service used to encrypt internet traffic.
When an Onavo Protect user opens a mobile app or website, Onavo redirects the traffic to Facebook’s servers and the action is logged in a database, according to Onavo’s website and the people familiar with the system. Facebook’s product teams can analyze the aggregated data to get detailed information on things such as which apps people generally are using, how frequently, for how long, and whether more women than men use an app in a specific country. If data inside an app isn’t encrypted, the information can be as specific as the number of photos the average user likes or posts in a week.
Onavo Protect has been downloaded an estimated 24 million times, mostly on Android devices, according to app-research firm Sensor Tower. It isn’t clear how many people use it regularly.
The app’s privacy policy says it may share information with “affiliates” that include its owner, Facebook. “As part of this process, Onavo receives and analyzes information about your mobile data and app use,” according to the app’s description on Apple’s App Store.
“Instead of converting data for the purpose of advertising, they’re converting it to competitive intelligence,” said Ashkan Soltani, an independent researcher and former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. “Essentially this approach takes data generated by consumers and uses it in ways that directly hurts their interests—for example, to impede competitive innovation.”
Within a few months of Facebook’s acquisition of the Tel Aviv-based company in 2013, Onavo’s data paved the way for the social-media firm’s biggest deal, the February 2014 purchase of WhatsApp for what eventually was $22 billion, the people familiar said.
Onavo showed the messaging app was installed on 99% of all Android phones in Spain—showing WhatsApp was changing how an entire country communicated, the people said. That metric in particular put Facebook on notice, the people said.
Onavo also helped shape Facebook’s live-video strategy, other people familiar said. Employees could see usage patterns for live-video apps such as Meerkat and Twitter Inc.’s Periscope, one person said. That helped guide Facebook’s decision to add a live-video feature to its main app in early 2016.
With Snapchat, one of Facebook’s biggest rivals, Onavo, at one point, revealed information as detailed as how many Snaps were sent every day.
A year ago, Facebook began rolling out disappearing photo and video strings on Instagram called “Stories”, similar to the identically named feature on Snapchat, which spurned Facebook’s acquisition attempt in 2013.
After seeing Snapchat’s growth slow, Facebook rolled out the Stories format across all its major apps: Messenger, WhatsApp and Facebook.
Instagram is rapidly eating away at Snapchat’s share of new users
Snapchat still has a bigger share of new users in the U.S. — but not for long.
Sep 19, 2017
More new users are signing up for Snapchat than Instagram in the United States — but probably not for long, according to new data from Jumpshot, a marketing analytics company.
In August, 52 percent of new U.S. users signed up for Snapchat, compared to 48 percent for Instagram. The share represents a decline in Snapchat’s new enrollment dominance in the U.S., according to Jumpshot data that tracks clicks on new-user confirmation emails from both platforms (it does not count those who may have confirmed new accounts via text).
Meanwhile, Snapchat represented 38.5 percent of new signups globally compared with Instagram’s 61.5 percent in August.
Snap, though, hasn’t focused on growing international usership, preferring instead to target people in developed nations with robust cellular networks and bigger bank accounts.
Since Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012, the social photo-sharing platform has seen its usership soar to 700 million monthly active users globally. Snap, which doesn’t disclose monthly active users — considered a key metric in determining user growth — hasn’t seen its daily active users grow as fast as investors would like (it had 173 million daily active users in its Q2 earnings, up 21 percent from a year earlier).
Snapchat has touted its young and devoted user base, but competition from Instagram is making it harder for Snapchat to expand into other age groups. Instagram — and parent Facebook — has been relentlessly copying Snapchat’s features, and it seems to be paying off when it comes to claiming new users.
Jumpshot tracks anonymized data from 100 million global users across platforms who’ve opted in to share their data in exchange for free Avast antivirus software.
04-27-2017, 03:26 PM
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