Meta Revenues Soar 25 Percent to $40.1 Billion

Facebook parent Meta earned a net income of $14 billion on revenues of $40.1 billion in the quarter ending December 31, 2023. Revenues soared 25 percent in the quarter, and the results were better than expected.

“We had a good quarter as our community and business continue to grow,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in what I assume was a deliberate understatement. “We’ve made a lot of progress on our vision for advancing AI and the metaverse.” Which I assume was a deliberate misdirect, since all of Meta’s revenues come from advertising, not the metaverse or its non-existent AI products.

On that note, Meta earned $38.7 billion in revenues from advertising in the quarter, which is 96.5 percent of the total. Reality Labs—i.e. Meta’s metaverse business—provided most of the remainder with $1 billion in revenues, up 47 percent year-over-year (YOY). And “other revenue” accounted for $334 million.

But Reality Labs isn’t just unprofitable, it’s a boat anchor. That business delivered a net loss of $4.6 billion (on just $1 billion in revenues), slightly higher than the $4.3 billion it lost in the year-ago quarter. It’s unclear how this represents progress: This business has never been profitable.

Meta also reported that it now has over 2.1 billion daily active users and 3 billion monthly active users, with an average monthly revenue per user of $13.12. That tracking is working wonders: A year ago, that figure was $11.23 per user.

Meta plans to release a generative AI something-something later this year, and Zuckerberg said in January that Meta’s long-term strategy is to develop an open source AI general intelligence (AGI) business. Details are light, but he gave a few tidbits to Fortune recently.

“We’ll be building the most popular and advanced AI products and services,” he told the publication. “If we succeed, everyone who uses our services will have a world-class AI assistant to help get things done. “It’s clear that we’re going to need our models to be able to reason, plan code, remember, and many other cognitive abilities in order to provide the best versions of the services that we envision. We’re playing to win here, and I expect us to continue investing aggressively in this area.”