{"id":49098,"date":"2025-07-31T03:10:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T03:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/49098\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T03:10:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T03:10:08","slug":"meta-crushed-q2-ad-revenue-oh-and-its-investing-in-ai-thats-way-smarter-than-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/49098\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Crushed Q2 Ad Revenue (Oh, And It\u2019s Investing In AI That\u2019s Way Smarter Than You)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty years ago, Facebook came out with a new feature that let you poke your friends. (Remember pokes<\/a>?)<\/p>\n

Now, Meta is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI to purportedly develop \u201cpersonal superintelligence,\u201d in CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s words, that teaches itself and outpaces human cognition.<\/p>\n

Quite the evolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI that surpasses human intelligence in every way we think is now in sight,\u201d CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors during the company\u2019s Q2 earnings call on Wednesday. \u201cMeta\u2019s vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone so that people can direct it towards what they value in their own lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg waxed poetic about a not-so-far-off future in which superintelligence \u201cempowers people to be more creative, develop culture and communities, connect with each other and lead more fulfilling lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cool, cool. But in the meanwhile, Meta remains primarily an advertising company. \n <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Total revenue in the second quarter was $47.5 billion, up 22% year-over-year, with advertising accounting for nearly all of that at $46.6 billion, up 21% YOY.<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s stock soared by more than 11% in after-hours trading.<\/p>\n

Ad-romeda<\/p>\n

Meta is making a massive investment in AI because \u201cwe have a conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do,\u201d Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n

And that includes improving ad performance, of course.<\/p>\n


\n Subscribe<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\n AdExchanger Daily<\/p>\n

Get our editors\u2019 roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg attributed Meta\u2019s particularly strong performance in Q2 to its ads business \u201cunlocking greater efficiency and gains\u201d by applying AI across its system.<\/p>\n

For example, in Q2, Meta introduced new personalization enhancements to Andromeda, its AI-powered recommendation model for ads. Andromeda underpins the ad retrieval stage of Meta\u2019s ad system by selecting several thousand relevant ads to serve at any given moment from a pool of tens of millions of potential candidates.<\/p>\n

These improvements drove roughly 5% more ad conversions on Instagram and 3% more on Facebook, according to Zuckerberg. Andromeda is also being rolled out to new surfaces, including Facebook Reels.<\/p>\n

Pricing and performance<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s \u201cengagement tailwinds,\u201d in the words of CFO Susan Li, led to an 11% uptick in the total number of ad impressions across all of Meta\u2019s properties, although ad load optimizations on Facebook were also a factor.<\/p>\n

And demand was there to meet the scaled-up supply.<\/p>\n

The average price per ad increased by 9% in the second quarter driven by improved ad performance. Although pricing growth overall slowed modestly quarter over quarter<\/a> because of accelerated impression growth in Q2 across the family of apps.<\/p>\n

These results are directly related to Meta\u2019s focus on improving monetization efficiency, Li said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe continue to optimize ad supply across each surface to better deliver ads at the time and place they are most relevant to people,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

A-eye<\/p>\n

But even as Meta refines the mechanics of its advertising system, its vision is fixed on advanced AI intelligence and, well, eyeglasses.<\/p>\n

Although overall VR headset sales declined, sales of AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta glasses have tripled year-over-year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In answer to an investor question about whether smart glasses will eventually replace smartphones, Zuckerberg answered with a \u201cyes, and.\u201d<\/p>\n

He views glasses as the ideal form factor for AI because people can engage both visually and auditorily while staying hands-free and, unlike in virtual reality, connected to their physical surroundings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wear contact lenses, and if I didn\u2019t have my vision corrected, I\u2019d be at a cognitive disadvantage going through the world,\u201d Zuckerberg said. \u201cI think in the future, if you don\u2019t have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, [you\u2019ll] probably be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people who you\u2019re working with or competing against.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty years ago, Facebook came out with a new feature that let you poke your friends. (Remember pokes?)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[38117,181,191,37866,831,12424,1282,38118,38119,38116,10497,37810,38120,74],"class_list":["post-49098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-computing","tag-andromeda","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-computing","tag-earnings-report","tag-featured","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-meta","tag-meta-ad-platform","tag-meta-ad-revenue","tag-meta-superintelligence","tag-platforms","tag-superintelligence","tag-susan-li","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}