K-D Acres

Awesome living independently here at K-D Acres with everything we need and more; cable, internet, lunch & dinner. Close to God, family and friends at all times.

We just released our community update and quarterly results. You can read my full community and strategy update from our conference call below. More than 2.6 bi...llion people now use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger each month, and more than 2 billion people use at least one of our services every day. This has been an important year. We’ve made progress on some of our hardest issues and we’ve built a lot of products I’m really proud of. We’re building the best messaging and stories and community tools in the world, and our video services are getting better, but we still have a lot of work to do. Thanks for being on this journey with us. --- We had a solid quarter, and our community and business continue to grow quickly. 2.3 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.5 billion every day. Revenue grew 33% year-over-year to $13.7 billion. Last quarter, for the first time, we also shared the number of people who use at least one of our apps each month. We believe this is a better way to measure our community over time because so many people use more than one of our apps. There are now more than 2.6 billion people using Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger each month, up from around 2.5 billion last quarter. And now, on average, more than 2 billion people use at least one of our services every day. Today I want to talk about our strategy overall as we navigate challenges and opportunities on several fronts. For one, we're seeing the way people connect shifting to private messaging and stories. We have great products here that people love, but it will take some time for our business to catch up to our community growth. Two, we're seeing video grow dramatically across the ecosystem, and while Watch is now growing very quickly, we're well behind YouTube and still working to make this a unique people-centric experience. Three, we continue to face increased safety and security threats. We have significantly improved our systems here, but we have more to do. Let's start with messaging and stories. Public sharing will always be very important, but people increasingly want to share privately too -- and that includes both to smaller audiences with messaging, and ephemerally with stories. People feel more comfortable being themselves when they know their content will only be seen by a smaller group and when their content won't stick around forever. Messaging and stories make up the vast majority of growth in the sharing that we're seeing. On messaging specifically, we think we've built the best messaging apps in the world. People now send around 100 billion messages each day using our services, and even our second most popular service, Messenger, has a higher daily message volume than SMS had globally at its peak. And this isn't just text -- people share more photos, videos and links on WhatsApp and Messenger than they do on social networks. We are leading in most countries, but our biggest competitor by far is iMessage, and in important countries like the US where the iPhone is strong, Apple bundles iMessage as a default texting app, and it’s still ahead. In countries where there's more competition between iOS and Android, like much of Europe, people tend to prefer our services. Now, it's worth noting that one of the main reasons people prefer our services -- especially WhatsApp -- is because of its stronger record on privacy. WhatsApp is completely end-to-end encrypted, does not store your messages, and doesn't store the keys to your messages in China or anywhere else. This is important because if our systems can't see your messages, then that means governments and bad actors won't be able to access them through us either. Our roadmap focuses on continuing to make WhatsApp and Messenger even simpler, faster, and adding basic utility features like payments. We've found that every time we make our services faster and simpler, people communicate more. We'll also keep pushing our messaging services to be more private and secure, and we believe this will continue to be a competitive advantage for us. On the business side of messaging, our first step has been to enable people to connect with businesses organically in ways they find useful, and then the second step is to give businesses additional paid tools to increase those interactions. We're well into step one at this point, with more than 3 million accounts on WhatsApp Business. We’ll begin step two with a couple of products: paid messaging and ads in stories. And by making businesses pay to send messages, we believe it will make them more selective with what they send. Payments will make each of these services more useful for people and businesses even though we don't plan to profit from it directly. I'll update with more progress on these efforts in the next few quarters. On stories, we are even better positioned. People now share more than 1 billion stories every day. We lead in almost every country. There are a couple of reasons we've focused on building stories in all our apps. First, I just think that this is the future. People want to share in ways that don't stick around permanently and I want to make sure that we fully embraced this. Second, stories is a medium, like feeds, that can feel very different in very different contexts. So just like most major social apps have feeds -- including Pinterest, Twitter, or LinkedIn -- but you wouldn't say that those services do the same things, I think many services will have stories in the future too but will serve different functions. While this effort is going well, we're also working through a couple of challenges here: One is that while WhatsApp Status and Instagram Stories immediately took off and have been huge successes, Facebook Stories started off slower. It's now growing quickly and I think we'll be in a better position soon, but our effort to shift Facebook from News Feed-first to stories-first hasn't been as smooth as I'd hoped. But this is important for the Facebook community long term. Another challenge is that we're earlier in developing our ads products for stories, so we don't make as much money from them yet as we do from feed ads. We're following our normal playbook here of building out the best consumer products first and focusing on succeeding there before ramping up ads. I'm optimistic that we'll get ads in stories to perform as well as feed over time, and that the opportunity will be even bigger because it looks like stories will be a bigger medium than feed has been. But I want to be upfront that even assuming we get to where we want to go -- from a feed-only world to a feed-plus-stories world -- it will take some time and our revenue growth may be slower during that period, like it was while transitioning our products to mobile. Now, talking about messaging and stories raises the question of what's the future of our feed products and the Facebook app overall. On feeds specifically, people continue to use them heavily -- and we don't expect that to decrease. From a business perspective, feeds will drive the majority of our growth over the next couple of years, at least until stories become an even bigger driver. On the Facebook app overall, what we see is that we are generally stable although we may be close to saturated in developed countries, while we continue to grow quickly in developing countries. For a few years, we saw a trend where people's time spent was increasing primarily because they were consuming more video and public content even as they interacted with friends and family less. But people were telling us what they wanted was to interact with people more, so we didn't think this trend was sustainable. We've made a number of changes this year to focus the product on meaningful social interactions, and those generally seem to be working. That means the trends in how people are interacting have improved, even though we've purposefully reduced time spent on things like lower-quality viral videos and news to achieve this. While there's a lot to do to improve News Feed, our roadmap for the Facebook app is very focused on a few priorities: stories, which we've discussed, video, which I'll get to in a moment, and a much bigger focus on communities and groups. If the last 10 years have been about friends and family, then the next 10 years will be about your communities as well. When we say communities, we mean both helping people connect with people who share their interests -- which is a major need in people's lives -- and also building out specific services for bringing people closer together -- like helping you find someone to date, or find a job, or buy and sell things, or grow your small business, or create an event, or start fundraisers, or bring together a group to volunteer. A lot of these services are growing quickly. Hundreds of millions of people now belong to meaningful communities that are a central part of their social support structure. Marketplace is now used by 800 million people -- and is emerging as one of the most popular places to buy vehicles online. On jobs, our new tool has helped people find more than 1 million jobs. On fundraisers, in the last year we've helped people raise more than $300 million for charities on their birthdays alone. And I'm looking forward to rolling out dating across the world soon too. These are services that generally benefit from having everyone you know connected on a single platform. And while people may not spend as much time in some of these tools as in News Feed, these are very high-value activities for our community. We're seeing a similar dynamic in Instagram, where there's still a lot to improve in feed, but we're increasingly focused on other experiences as well. But in Instagram, instead of focusing on communities we're very focused on helping you explore your interests. This will take the form of IGTV, which I'll discuss more in a minute, plus new shopping experiences, and really building out Explore. These areas have huge potential for serving our community, and a lot of potential for businesses as well. For example, Explore is already about 20% of the time that people spend in Instagram. But unlike feed, we haven't built any ads experience for it yet, so that’s an opportunity. Now, I want to discuss what we're seeing with video specifically since it's such an important and growing area. Our efforts have grown but we've had challenges reconciling all this passive video consumption with what people uniquely want from us, which is meaningful social interactions. Video has grown a lot on our services, but as I mentioned earlier, we hit a dynamic where when it grows in feeds in Facebook and Instagram, it displaces some social interactions and people tell us it makes the experience less valuable, even though they're spending more time on it. So the solution to this has been building separate video experiences outside of our feeds, with Watch on Facebook and IGTV on Instagram. What we've found is that when people seek out video experiences intentionally, they don't displace social interactions as much, and the quality of the experience is generally higher. We've also been able to build experiences that help creators build communities around their content -- which fits our mission and our focus to encourage meaningful interactions. At this point, Watch has really hit its stride and it’s growing incredibly quickly -- about 3x in the last few months in the US alone. IGTV is still earlier in its development, but I think we have a good sense of how to make it work as well. To be clear, these services are still well behind YouTube, which is our primary competitor in this space, but they're growing very quickly. That said, beyond the mission challenges of video displacing social interactions, there's also a business challenge, which is that video monetizes significantly less well per minute than people interacting in feeds. So this means that even though we've made video more community-oriented and minimized displacement of social interactions, as video grows it will still displace some other services where we'd probably make more money. From a mission and a business perspective, we still believe this is the right thing to do. Video is a critical part of the future, it's what our community wants, and as long as we can make it social I think it will end up being a large part of our business as well. Next, I want to talk about safety and security. Let me start by saying that last month we had a serious security issue. Our teams did well to find and close the vulnerability quickly, but we have a long road ahead to prevent these kinds of attacks in the future. Over the last couple of years, though, we've done a lot of work and made a lot of progress. We still have at least a year before our systems are at the level that we want, but they're getting better every day and that's both technology and people. Our systems for proactively identifying harmful content are improving. Our systems for detecting interference in elections are a lot more mature now. The upcoming elections will be a real test of the protections we've put in place. With a community of more than two billion people we will see all the good and bad that humanity can do, and we will never be perfect, but I'm proud of the work that we’re doing here. We've reduced the incentives to spread misinformation. We're partnering more closely with governments and outside experts to improve security -- including here in the US. And we've set a new standard for transparency in advertising. This quarter alone, we've found and taken down foreign influence campaigns from Russia and Iran attempting to interfere in the US, UK, Middle East and elsewhere -- as well as groups in Brazil that have been active in their own country. We still have a lot of work to do in all of these areas that I’ve talked about. News Feed continues to be very important. We're building the best messaging and stories and community tools in the world. Our video services are getting better and growing quickly. We still have a lot of work to do on safety. And we're also heavily investing in AR and VR, as well as hardware for bringing people closer together -- like Portal for video presence, and Oculus Quest, the all-in-one VR experience that delivers Rift-like quality with no wires attached. With all of this ahead, I expect 2019 to be another year of significant investment. Dave will say more about this in a moment. But I want you to know that looking out beyond 2019 I know that we need to make sure our costs and revenue are better matched over time, and that's something that I'm focused on as well. Overall, this has been an important year. It's been a tough year, but we've built products that I'm proud of and made a lot of progress on some of our hardest issues. As always, I appreciate your support and thank you for being part of this journey with us.