Meta Q&A Q4 2021: iOS changes, new regulation in EU, and TikTok competition

All you need to know about this earnings season

Attitudes: Apps like TikTok are growing very quickly.

Goals: Shift to short-form video, as well as focus on serving young adults over optimizing overall engagement.

Expect first quarter 2022 total revenue to be in the range of $27 billion to $29 billion, which represents 3% to 11% year-over-year growth.

Headwinds: With Apple's iOS changes and new regulation in Europe, there's a clear trend where less data is available to deliver personalized ads.

Anticipated expense growth driven by investments in technical and product talent and infrastructure-related costs.

Mark Zuckerberg:The balance of content that people see in feeds is shifting a little bit more toward stuff that isn't coming from their friends, it is kind of shifting toward more public content. What we're seeing in feeds is just basically this content consumption and a lot of just really highly engaging content that forms the basis for conversations, whether it's in chat or in common trends in those feed apps. But that type of creative work is a lot more of what we're seeing across the feed apps, so whether that's Facebook or Instagram.

Dave Wehner: As in the past when we were focused on Stories, we're really focused on consumer experience and really making short-form video work effectively on both Instagram and Facebook, and we're already seeing that be the biggest driver of growth on Instagram, and it's growing very quickly on Facebook. So we're really encouraged by what we're seeing. But we're really focused on making the consumer experience right. And over time, we do think it's format that will work effectively for advertising, we're confident in our ability to monetize over time. But right now, there's relatively few ads in Reels today.

Dave Wehner: On the expense outlook, we're not breaking out expenses by segment, but I probably can give some color here. You know, we're expecting accelerated headcount growth in 2022 to be the biggest contributor of expense growth, and that's largely in tech and product roles to support the seven product priorities that Mark laid out: Reels, community messaging, commerce, ads, privacy, AI, and the metaverse. We expect family of apps to continue to drive the majority of expense growth in 2022. Though we do expect reality labs operating loss to increase meaningfully in '22.

Dave Wehner: We saw the revenue impact with iOS in Q4, and that was in line with our expectations and similar to the Q3 headwind. But as we go into 2022, we're going to be lapping a period in which in Q1 and Q2, those headwinds were not in place in the year-ago period. So that definitely makes for a tough comp in the first half of the year. E-commerce was an area where we saw, you know, a meaningful slowdown in growth in Q4. And similarly, we've seen other areas like gaming be a challenge.