Meta’s advertising revenue climbed 22 per cent year on year over the course of 2024. In the last quarter of the calendar year, it jumped 21 per cent compared to the same time in 2023.
Ad impressions over Meta’s family of apps grew six per cent and 11 per cent year on year for the fourth quarter and full year 2024, respectively. Asia-Pacific saw the largest ad impressions growth for the business.
The average price for ad, meanwhile, increased by 14 per cent and 10 per cent year-over-year.
Meta’s finance boss, Susan Li, said that online commerce was the largest contributor to its year-on-year growth. On a user geography basis, ad revenue growth was strongest in Rest of World at 27 per cent followed by Asia-Pacific and Europe at 23 per cent and 22 per cent, respectively. North America grew 18 per cent.
Meta’s Australian head honcho, Will Easton, had this to say:
“Despite the challenging economic environment in Australia and New Zealand we saw strong growth last year, demonstrating that Meta continues to be a platform of choice for both consumers and advertisers in the region. In the coming year, we’ll see Meta’s investments in areas like AI, glasses, and our social media platforms continue to drive impact locally.”
These numbers bested Wall Street’s expectations.
“We continue to make good progress on AI, glasses, and the future of social media,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder
and CEO. “I’m excited to see these efforts scale further in 2025.”
The company’s Meta AI chatbot also surpassed 700 million monthly active users in January, up 100 million since December, Li told analysts.
“Once a service reaches that kind of scale, it usually develops a durable, long term advantage,” Zuckerberg told analysts on Wednesday.
That should be heartening in the face of DeepSeek’s rapid growth.
Meta did not provide a revenue outlook for 2025, but investments in the company’s core business “will give us an opportunity to continue delivering strong revenue growth throughout 2025,” finance chief Susan Li said in a statement.
However, it remains to be seen whether advertisers will continue to spend on the platform following Zuck’s dramatic U-turn on content moderation. It reportedly told its biggest spenders in the US that it is “100 per cent committed” to brand safety.
However, in a prepared statement, Zuckerberg doubled down on his support for the decidedly un-brand safe Trump administration.
“We ended 2024 on a strong note with now more than 3.3 billion people using at least one of our apps each day. This is going to be a really big year. I know it always feels like every year is a big
year, but more than usual it feels like the trajectory for most of our long-term initiatives is going to be a lot clearer by the end of this year,” said Zuck.
“This is also going to be a big year for redefining our relationship with governments. We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritises American technology
winning, and that will defend our values and interests abroad. And I’m optimistic about the progress and innovation this is going to unlock.
“So this is going to be a big year. I think this is the most exciting and dynamic I have ever seen our industry. Between AI, glasses, massive infrastructure projects, doing a bunch of work to try to accelerate our business, and building the future of social media, we have a lot to do. I think we’re going to build some awesome things that shape the future of human connection.”
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