This week pretty much every major tech company released their earnings results. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook... all of them reported decent (or great) numbers and if we charted them all, they'd mostly all look the same: up and to the right. The latter of those 5 tech giants, which happens to be the most reliant on advertising revenue, reported particularly impressive results.
Reports of Facebook's death...
Have been greatly exaggerated. The kids might think Facebook is dead, but they obviously didn't read the report in which Facebook reported $26bn of revenue in a single quarter. Indeed, Facebook has gotten so good at targeted advertising that in the first 3 months of this year it has raked in more than $48 per user (US & Canada). That works out to about $16 a month for Facebook — more than what many streaming services charge — and it goes without saying but we're going to say it anyway: Facebook doesn't pay a dime for any of the content you see in between those ads.
Peak Facebook ads?
This may be as good as it gets for Facebook's targeted advertising biz as Apple's new privacy feature limits what data apps can share. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg spent a lot of his time this week explaining how Facebook planned to deal with the changes (e-commerce was basically his answer) tells you how big a deal this change is.
