Fb is pivoting to video – short-form, this time.

Woot. All aboard, I suppose.

However as Mark Zuckerberg extolled the virtues of Fb’s TikTok clone, Reels, on the corporate’s earnings name Wednesday afternoon (apparently it’s the fastest-growing content material format when it comes to engagement on Instagram), Meta’s share value was experiencing an alarming and precipitous slide.

Fb’s inventory plunged greater than 20% in after-hours buying and selling – critically, it fell off a cliff (see beneath) – in response to a bleak outlook partially because of Apple-related headwinds and partially a results of slowing progress as engagement shifts to shorter-form codecs, like Reels, that monetize extra slowly than information feeds.

Apple’s iOS 14 privateness modifications alone will doubtless have a $10 billion general impression on Fb’s enterprise this 12 months, stated CFO Dave Wehner.

“It’s a reasonably vital headwind for our enterprise,” Wehner stated.

Dealing with the headwinds

The query is, what’s Fb doing to mitigate the impression on concentrating on accuracy and measurement?

Just a few issues, in keeping with COO Sheryl Sandberg, together with engaged on closing the reporting knowledge hole from lacking web-based iOS 14 conversions, with instruments like Aggregated Occasion Measurement that mannequin knowledge to recreate attribution analytics.

However though these efforts ought to assist, “we count on the general concentrating on and measurement headwinds to reasonably improve from Apple’s modifications and from regulatory modifications in Q1 and all through 2022,” Sandberg stated.

On prime of that, Fb will face robust comps within the first half of 2022, for the reason that first two quarters of final 12 months have been earlier than Apple absolutely rolled out its AppTrackingTransparency framework.

Even so, it’s solely honest to level out that Fb continues to be a revenue-generating monster.

Whole ad income in This fall was $32.6 billion, up 20% year-over-year, and 2021 additionally marked the primary time Fb’s enterprise generated greater than $100 billion in annual income. (It was simply shy of $118 billion, for the document.)

Bitter grapes

However guess who made nicely over two-and-a-half instances that quantity in annual income, at $257 billion, in 2021? Alphabet, after all.

And Wehner had a factor or two to say about Google’s success, significantly the power of Google search promoting through the again half of final 12 months.

Though ecommerce is often robust in This fall, Fb noticed a significant slowdown in progress in that vertical because of Apple’s iOS 14 privateness modifications – which is “fairly notable,” Wehner stated, as a result of “Google referred to as out seeing power in that exact same vertical.”

“These restrictions from Apple are designed in a method that carves out browsers from the monitoring immediate Apple requires for apps,” he continued. Meaning “search advertisements may have entry to much more third-party knowledge for measurement and optimization functions than app-based platforms like ours.”

To sum it up, “in the case of utilizing knowledge, you may consider it as … not likely apples to apples for us,” he stated. (Ha, good one, Wehner.)

“Consequently, we imagine Google’s search advertisements enterprise may have benefited relative to providers like ours,” Wehner stated. “Provided that Apple continues to take billions of {dollars} a 12 months from Google’s search advertisements, the inducement clearly exists for this coverage discrepancy to proceed.”

Metaverse, and many others.

Oh yeah, and Zuck stated some stuff in regards to the metaverse. It’s considered one of Meta’s prime seven funding priorities for the 12 months, together with Reels, neighborhood messaging, commerce, advertisements, privateness and AI.

However no phrase but on whether or not or once we can count on to get legs.