Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is going through a difficult time in its life. A few months ago, the company presented million-dollar losses due to its investment in the Metaverse. Two months later, it closed its connectivity division and laid off 13% of its total workforce (something that could be repeated shortly). This month, Meta itself had to buy back company shares valued at 40.000 million dollars to avoid a big fall in its price.
As it has been learned, Meta’s situation could still be delicate, despite the rise in its share price after the buyback, and its business could be in jeopardy due to Apple’s privacy policy on its mobile devices, as well as the enormous growth of TikTok, whose popularity has only grown since 2018.
In a leaked internal document from Meta’s marketing director, Alex Schultz, the executive warns his employees to be cautious with the company’s forecasts of improvement: “We have to keep our eyes on the horizon and not focus on the reaction of the street and the price of our shares. I believe in this company, but we are still at the beginning of this change of course, not everything will go well”, wrote.
The manager wrote that Meta is still “at the whim of Apple”, referring to the ATT of the apple company, a privacy policy that, by default, means that apps do not obtain user usage data to segment their advertising, and they must be the ones who approve that it can be make this use of your private info. A change that would have seriously affected the advertising business of Facebook and Instagram.
Schultz also made mention of Reels, Meta’s short video feature created to compete with TikTok. In the document, the manager says that the “monetization efficiency” of the feature thanks to ads has increased, “but it’s still too low”, and what Reels is “even smaller than TikTok”.
