Facebook Parent Meta Platforms Reports First Ever Revenue Drop

Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. posted its first decline in revenue and issued a muted outlook on digital advertising as it contends with growing competition from rival TikTok.

The company reported quarterly revenue of US$28.8 billion, down almost 1% from a year earlier and slightly below the US$28.9 billion Wall Street was expecting. It marks the first time that the company has posted a quarterly drop in revenue from the year earlier.

“We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business,” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. “It’s always hard to predict how deep or how long these cycles will be, but I’d say that the situation seems worse than it did a quarter ago,” he said on an earnings call.

Meta is grappling with a digital advertising market in upheaval from surging inflation and other factors that are causing a slowdown in ad spending. Google parent Alphabet Inc. on Tuesday reported the slowest rate of growth since the second quarter of 2020, when the pandemic crimped demand for advertising in some areas. Rival Snap Inc. reported its weakest-ever quarterly sales growth last week while Twitter Inc. reported a decline in revenue.

Meta also disclosed that Facebook’s daily active user base rose to 1.97 billion users. The figure was 1.96 billion three months ago. The increase defied expectations of analysts surveyed by FactSet who thought user numbers would fall.

The company posted a net profit of US$6.7 billion for the second quarter, the third quarter in a row Meta’s bottom line has fallen. The company hasn’t experienced such a slump since the fourth quarter of 2012.

The weak advertising demand was reflected in Meta’s average price per ad, which fell 14% in the quarter. A year ago, the company reported an increase of 47%, year over year, for its average price per ad.

The company said it continued to face challenges in targeting ads as a result of changes made by Apple Inc. to the iPhone’s operating system. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, on her last earnings call before she departs Meta after 14 years, said the company is adapting its business to do better ad targeting—with less user data—with products such as click-to-message ads, which open a chat with a business whenever a user clicks on the ad.

Such ads are already a multibillion-dollar business growing at double digits, she said. “We are hugely optimistic about this area of our business, and I am very convinced it will work,” Ms. Sandberg said.

Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said the company, like others, is feeling the pinch from the strong dollar, which is weighing on the top line.

Meta’s shares have retreated since the company posted quarterly results in February that showed a sharper-than-expected decline in profit, gloomy revenue outlook and dip in daily users.

Meta’s stock closed more than 6% higher and fell more than 4% after hours following the results.

The company also said it expects its total expenses for 2022 to be between US$85 billion and US$88 billion, down from the company’s previous outlook of US$87 billion to US$92 billion. The company attributed the lowered forecast to a reduction in hiring and overall expense-growth plans for the year.

Mr. Zuckerberg repeated that the company plans to slow the pace of long-term investments and steadily reduce head-count growth over the next year.

“This is a period that demands more intensity,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “And I expect us to get more done with fewer resources.”

Meta is going through a period of transition. Mr. Zuckerberg in April said the company would change how users would see content, in a bid to boost engagement. The company would use artificial intelligence to recommend content to Facebook and Instagram users from around those social networks, rather than solely showing users content from accounts they already follow. The effort mimics one of the signature features of rival TikTok, which Mr. Zuckerberg in February said posed stiff competition for Meta.

Nearly one in six posts shown on Facebook and Instagram feeds are now coming from accounts that users don’t follow and are based on artificial intelligence recommendations, according to stats shared by Mr. Zuckerberg. That could rise to nearly one in every three posts shown to users coming from accounts they don’t follow by the end of 2023.

During the quarter, Meta saw a 30% increase in the time that users are engaging with Reels, the company’s answer to TikTok short-form videos, Mr. Zuckerberg said Wednesday.

Meta, however, doesn’t yet monetize Reels at the levels of some of its other features.

“In the near term, the faster that Reels grows, the more revenue that actually displaces from higher monetizing surfaces,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “In theory, we could mitigate the short-term headwind by pushing less hard on growing Reels. But that would be worse for our products and business longer term.”

Mr. Zuckerberg added that Reels ads are on pace to generate US$1 billion in annual revenue.

Earlier this year, Meta said it planned to slow the pace of some of its long-term investments and adjust hiring plans. In May, the company disclosed a sharp slowdown in hiring, and in June, the company’s head of engineering told his managers in an internal memo to identify and report low performers so they could force those employees out. Earlier this month, the company let go of 368 contractors, including several custodial staff, at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

The company on Tuesday also said it planned to raise the price of its Quest 2 virtual-reality headset by nearly 34% to US$399.99, citing a rise in the costs to make and ship the products.

The company’s Reality Labs division, which includes VR hardware, posted revenue of US$452 million. Analysts expected it to generate US$431 million in quarterly sales.

Separately, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday it is seeking to block Meta from acquiring Within Unlimited Inc. and its virtual-reality dedicated fitness app, Supernatural. The deal, the FTC alleges, would lessen competition in the market and violate antitrust laws. Meta rejected the FTC’s position and said the purchase would be good for the development of the virtual-reality market.

The company also announced that come November, Mr. Wehner will transition into chief strategy officer, a new role at the company. Succeeding him as CFO will be Susan Li, Meta’s current vice president of finance. Mr. Wehner has served as Meta’s CFO since June 2014.

Wedding planner Sterling Boulet has some advice for brides-to-be regarding lab-grown diamonds, which cost a fraction of the natural ones.

“If you’re trying to get your man to propose, they’ll propose faster if you offer this as an option,” says Boulet, of Raleigh, N.C. Recently, she adds, a friend’s fiancé “thanked me the next three times I saw him” for telling him about the cheaper lab-made option.

Man-made diamonds are catching on, despite some lingering stigma. This year was the first time that sales of lab-made and natural mined loose diamonds, primarily used as center stones in engagement rings, were split evenly, according to data from Tenoris, a jewellery and diamond trend-analytics company.

The rise of lab-made stones, however, is bringing up quirks alongside the perks. Now that blingier engagement rings—above two or three carats—are more affordable, more people are dealing with the peculiarities of wearing rather large rocks.

An engagement ring made with a lab-grown diamond at Ada Diamonds in New York City. PHOTO: CAM POLLACK/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Esther Hare, a 5-foot-11-inch former triathlete, sought out a 4.5-carat lab-made oval-shaped diamond to fit her larger hands as a part of her vow renewal in Hawaii last year. It was a far cry from the half-carat ring her husband proposed with more than 25 years ago and the 1.5-carat upgrade they purchased 10 years ago. Hare, 50, who lives in San Jose, Calif., and works in high tech, chose a $40,000 lab-made diamond because “it’s nuts” to have to spend $100,000 on a natural stone. “It had to be big—that was my vision,” she says.

But the size of the ring has made it less practical at times. She doesn’t wear it for athletic training and swaps in her wedding band instead. And she is careful to leave it at home when traveling. “A lot of times I won’t take it on vacation because it’s just a monster,” she says.

The average retail price for a one-carat lab-made loose diamond decreased to $1,426 this year from $3,039 in 2020, according to the Tenoris data. Similar-sized loose natural diamonds cost $5,426 this year, compared with $4,943 in 2020.

Lab-made diamonds have essentially the same chemical makeup as natural ones, and look the same, unless viewed through sophisticated equipment that gauges the characteristics of emitted light.

At Ritani, an online jewellery retailer, lab-made diamond sales make up about 70% of the diamonds sold, up from roughly 30% two years ago, says Juliet Gomes, head of customer service at the company, based in White Plains, N.Y.

Ritani sometimes records videos of the lab-diamonds pinging when exposed to a “diamond tester,” a tool that judges authenticity, to show customers that the man-made rocks behave the same as natural ones. “We definitely have some deep conversations with them,” Gomes says.

Not all gem dealers are rolling with these stones.

Philadelphia jeweller Steven Singer only stocks the natural stuff in his store and is planning a February campaign to give about 1,000 one-carat lab-made diamonds away free to prove they are “worthless.” Anyone can sign up online and get one in the mail; even shipping is free. “I’m not selling Frankensteins that were built in a lab,” Singer says.

Some brides are turned off by the larger bling now allowed by the lower prices.When her now-husband proposed with a two-carat lab-grown engagement ring, Tiffany Buchert, 40, was excited about the prospect of marriage—but not about the size of the diamond, which she says struck her as “costume jewellery-ish.”

“I said yes in the moment, of course, I didn’t want it to be weird,” says the physician assistant from West Chester, Pa.

But within weeks, she says, she fessed up, telling her fiancé: “I think I hate this ring.”

The couple returned it and then bought a one-carat natural diamond for more than double the price.

Couples find that lab-grown diamonds have made it more affordable to get engaged. PHOTO: CAM POLLACK/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

When Boulet, the wedding planner in Raleigh, got engaged herself, she was over the moon when her fiancé proposed with a 2.3 carat lab-made diamond ring. “It’s very shiny, we were almost worried it was too shiny and was going to look fake,” she says.

It doesn’t, which presents another issue—looking like someone who really shelled out for jewellery. Boulet will occasionally volunteer that her diamond ring came from a lab.

“I don’t want people to think I’m putting on airs, or trying to be flashier than I am,” she says.

For Daniel Teoh, a 36-year-old software engineer outside of Detroit, buying a cheaper lab-made diamond for his fiancée meant extra room in his $30,000 ring budget.

Instead of a bigger ring, he got her something they could both enjoy. During a walk while on an annual ski trip to South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Teoh popped the question and handed his now-wife a handmade wooden box that included a 2.5-carat lab-made diamond ring—and a car key.

She put on the ring, celebrated with both of their sisters and a friend, who was the unofficial photographer of the happy event, and then they drove back to the house. There, she saw a 1965 Mustang GT coupe in Wimbledon white with red stripes and a bow on top.

Looking back, Teoh says, it was still the diamond that made the big first impression.

“It wasn’t until like 15 minutes later she was like ‘so, what’s with this key?’” he adds.

Facebook Parent Meta Platforms Reports First Ever Revenue Drop

Social-media giant missed Wall Street’s sales expectation but added users—defying analysts’ projections.

Couples find that lab-grown diamonds make it cheaper to get engaged or upgrade to a bigger ring. But there are rocky moments.