Meta held its third-quarter 2024 earnings call last week and discussed several topics affecting advertisers.
Here are my main takeaways…
4 points
1. Advertising revenue increased by 18.5% compared with the third quarter of last year.
This was primarily driven by $17 billion in advertising revenue in the United States and Canada.
Meta continues to make money from ads, which means advertisers continue to spend money. Advertising growth isn’t slowing down.
What do advertisers see?
2. The average price per ad increased year-over-year for the fourth consecutive quarter.
Advertising prices increased 11% in the third quarter compared with the same period last year.
There was a time when the average price per ad was declining quarter-over-quarter, likely due to an increase in video and reel impressions.
Many factors affect cost, but this is the trend now.
3. At the same time, ad impression growth continues to slow, up just 7% compared to a year ago.
Advertising costs outpace impression growth.
It’s worth noting that the number of ad impressions didn’t drop. Instead, the year-over-year increase in impressions is slowing down. This can be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that the environment that led to increased impressions and lower ad costs a year ago (largely driven by video) is no longer novel.
4. Threads has 275 million monthly users, with 1 million new users added every day.
Even so, Meta doesn’t expect Threads to be a significant revenue driver in 2025.
This seems to pour cold water on rumors that ads are coming to the app. Mark Zuckerberg has always maintained the monetization milestone of 1 billion users.
This isn’t necessarily good news for advertisers, as the added placements will certainly increase inventory and lower costs.
