Mark Zuckerberg envisions Threads as Meta’s next billion-person app

It’s that time of year when companies unveil their third quarter reports, highlighting recent market trends and developments. Spotify recently released its report, revealing a slight increase in users and revenue despite a price increase earlier this year. Now, Meta shares an overview of its performance. Meta reported revenue above $34 billion for the quarter, an increase of 23% from 2022. In discussions with analysts (via Engadget), Mark Zuckerberg highlighted Meta’s recent emphasis on “efficiency“, which led the company to reduce its workforce by more than 20,000 people over the past year. Zuckerberg sees this approach as effective, especially for navigating a “very volatile world“.

Looking at Meta’s platforms and user base, Facebook maintains its lead in monthly active users with 3.05 billion, an increase from last year. The broader Meta family, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, collectively has a user base exceeding 3.9 billion monthly users.

Meta’s concerted efforts to promote Threads appear to be yielding positive results. Threads has just under 100 million monthly active users, and Zuckerberg is considering a “good luck” so that the application reaches 1 billion users in the coming years.

Mark Zuckerberg shared his thoughts during the third-quarter earnings call, expressing his long-held belief in the need for a billion-person public conversation app that leans toward positivity. He sees a good chance of realizing this vision if they persist in the current direction for a few more years.

Zuckerberg also shared Meta’s increased focus on generative AI. “We will continue to prioritize a number of non-AI projects across the company to direct people toward AI work.“Zuckerberg said.

However, investments in AI will not reduce the budget reserved for the metaverse. Reality Labs, the Meta division in charge of AR and VR spending, has faced significant setbacks. Revenue fell to $210 million and losses soared to $3.7 billion for the quarter, surpassing $11 billion since the start of 2023.