Additionally, Meta will no longer provide statistics on Facebook usage.
In spite of the fact that it has continued its multibillion-dollar losing streak, Reality Labs, Meta’s division for augmented reality, virtual reality, and the metaverse, just had its finest quarter to date. With the help of its Quest headsets and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Reality Labs was able to produce more than one billion dollars in revenue during the fourth quarter of the year 2023.
In spite of the fact that the metaverse group of the corporation has achieved a new milestone by surpassing one billion dollars in revenue, it is anticipated that it will continue to rack up enormous losses for the foreseeable future. In the quarter, Reality Labs had a loss of $4.6 billion, and in 2023, the company lost more than $16 billion. According to Susan Li, the Chief Financial Officer of Meta, it is anticipated that these losses will “increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”
The fourth quarter, which includes the holiday shopping season, has traditionally been the time of year when reality achieves its highest level of success. It was on a call with analysts when Mark Zuckerberg made the suggestion that the business’s smart glasses had performed very well. He stated that EssilorLuxottica, the company that manufactures Ray-Ban sunglasses, was “planning on making more [smart glasses]than we’d both expected due to highly anticipated demand.” In addition, he stated that both Quest 2 and Quest 3 were “performing well,” with Quest 3 being referred to as the “most popular integrated reality device.”
Meta had a successful quarter, posting $40.1 billion to close out 2023. This brings the company’s overall revenue for the year to just under $135 billion. Reality Labs was not included in this calculation. In addition, the number of people using Facebook increased to 2.1 billion daily active users (DAUs). Susan Li, the Chief Financial Officer of Meta, stated that the firm was “transitioning away” from reporting the measure and that it would no longer report on Facebook’s daily or monthly active users or its “family monthly active people.”
When Facebook’s growth began to slow down in 2019, the corporation announced that it would eventually stop providing user statistics. This announcement was made in 2019. On the other hand, this development demonstrates how Facebook’s role inside the “family of apps” of the firm has evolved over the past few years. According to a survey that was released earlier this week by Pew Research, Instagram is continuing to expand in the United States, while the use of Facebook has remained unchanged.
However, Meta’s most recent software, Threads, is still expanding its user base. An increase from “just under” 100 million users in the fall of last year, Zuckerberg stated that the service now has 130 million monthly users. According to Zuckerberg, “Threads now has more people actively using it today than it did during its initial launch peak.” He was referring to the early surge of popularity that the program experienced despite the fact that it was only temporary.
In addition, Zuckerberg elaborated further on his recently announced goal of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) at Meta, stating that this will be the “theme” of the company’s product development efforts moving forward. It is necessary to develop complete general intelligence in order to provide the next generation of services, he stated. When it comes to providing the finest possible versions of the services that we imagine, it is quite evident that we are going to require our models to possess a wide range of cognitive capacities, including the ability to reason, plan, code, remember, and many more.
In addition, the CEO of Meta stated that it is highly improbable that any of the company’s applications will be made available in alternative app stores in Europe as a result of Apple’s contentious new developer regulations. “The way that they’ve implemented it, I would be very surprised if any developer chose to go into the alternative app stores,” added the developer. “They’ve made it so onerous, and I think so at odds with the intent of what the EU regulation was, that I think it’s just going to be very difficult for anyone, including ourselves, to really seriously entertain.”