- Meta Platforms grew revenue 21% year over year to $48.39 billion in Q4, in keeping with an earnings statement. The results topped expectations while the corporate outlined a year ahead that can carry heavy infrastructure costs related to artificial intelligence (AI).
- Ad impressions delivered across Meta’s portfolio of apps, which include Facebook and Instagram, increased 6% over the end-of-year period while the typical price per ad was up 14%. CFO Susan Li said that CPMs, or cost per 1,000 impressions, will proceed to lift over time as Meta’s promoting gets more precise and drives more conversions.
- While the drivers of Meta’s promoting growth were familiar in Q4, much of the discussion centered on newer bets in generative AI. More than 4 million Meta advertisers at the moment are using a minimum of certainly one of the tech firm’s generative AI tools, Li said.
Pricing growth continued to propel Meta’s core promoting business in Q4 2024, with the typical price per ad up 14% across the period that features the vacation shopping window. The social media giant for a while has tried to balance the ramp up of newer, lower-monetizing surfaces which might be popular with users, such as short-form video Reels, with improved precision for mature promoting formats. Meta also recently introduced ads to Threads, a micro-blogging app that competes with Elon Musk’s X, but doesn’t expect Threads promoting will meaningfully contribute to revenue in 2025.
Strong earnings results followed a whirl of media attention around Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s chummier relationship with President Donald Trump, a pullback on fact-checking initiatives and the fast rise of a generative AI platform from China called DeepSeek that has threatened U.S. rivals like OpenAI. The fact-checking retreat has raised some alarms within the promoting community but has not appeared to deliver a cloth impact on advertiser demand.
“From an ad revenue perspective, Meta dominated Q4 by pulling in considerably more revenue than another quarter within the last two years,” said Forrester Vice President and Research Director Mike Proulx in emailed comments. “The big query is whether or not advertisers will follow Meta in Q1 against a backdrop of heightened brand safety concerns. While they won’t prefer it, they may proceed to spend given Meta’s reach and effectiveness.”
Meta has focused its generative AI efforts around open-source technology that other developers can draw on when constructing their very own models. That’s exactly what DeepSeek did, as reported in The New York Times, and Meta sees potential upsides for its own business as AI dominates the agenda.
“I believe there’s a variety of novel things that [DeepSeek] did that I believe we’re still digesting … they’ve advances that we are going to hope to implement in our systems,” said Zuckerberg, who has called 2025 a “defining” year for AI, on a call discussing the earnings with analysts. “That’s a part of the character of how this works, whether it’s a Chinese competitor or not.”
Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on its AI infrastructure bets and hiring this year. Meta AI, its personal assistant, currently reaches about 700 million monthly lively users, with leadership projecting that number could reach 1 billion this year.
Continuing to advance generative AI could also persuade more advertisers to check out the technology. Meta has steadily rolled out generative AI promoting tools, including image, video and text generators, which might be now utilized by more than 4 million advertisers versus 1 million six months ago.
“There has been significant early adoption of our first video generation tool that we rolled out in October, Image Animation, with lots of of 1000’s of advertisers already using it monthly,” said CFO Li.
Advantage+ shopping campaigns, part of a bigger suite of AI-powered ad products, saw 70% year-over-year growth in Q4, indicating strong demand around the vacations. Advantage+ shopping campaigns have surpassed an annual revenue run-rate of $20 billion, in keeping with Li. Meta is working to streamline access to Advantage+ so advertisers now not need to choose from running a manual campaign or one powered by the AI offering.
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