Editor's Note: This article comes fromMars FinanceEditor's Note: This article comes from
Mars Finance
(ID: hxcj24h), Author: Liang Yushan, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
Facebook released its latest quarterly financial report a few days ago, showing that it is in a critical period of "internal and external difficulties". According to the financial report data, Facebook’s revenue in the quarter exceeded 16.8 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 28%, but its net profit fell by 49% year-on-year, almost cut in half.
On the conference call after the earnings report, analysts expressed concerns about Facebook's profit growth. Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Wehner (David Wehner) explained that Facebook’s core advertising business revenue has been affected by three major factors, resulting in a sharp decline, namely regulatory factors, platform changes, and Facebook’s enhancement of user privacy protection for its advertising products. shock.
The topic of privacy "revisiting the past" has successfully stimulated analysts to ask questions about Facebook's cryptocurrency project Libra. JPMorgan Chase analyst asked Facebook how to view the voice against Libra? Facebook founder Zuckerberg said: "Libra is like many encryption and content regulation issues we have encountered before. We know that they are very sensitive issues, so our approach is to discuss it publicly."
Seemingly anticipating all kinds of doubts from the outside world, Zuckerberg also issued an open letter on the company's development vision and goals through his personal Facebook account after the financial report was announced. The open letter has been Zuckerberg's communication tool during Facebook's important period. During the outbreak of the user privacy scandal in 2017 and New Year's Day in the past few years, Zuckerberg has used open letters to win public trust and introduce Facebook's future plans.
In the latest public letter from Zuckerberg, Libra appeared for the first time.
In the letter, Zuckerberg talked about the business and payment fields that he is working on expanding, saying that payment is a part that makes him very excited. "When I find out that it's easier for people to interact privately, payments are probably the most important part of that in the long run."
When it comes to payment, Libra is obviously a topic that cannot be avoided. Zuckerberg reiterated in the letter that Libra will help more people use financial tools, "its goal is to enable billions of people around the world who use services such as WhatsApp but may be excluded from banking services to have access to a safe and stable financial tool." , well-regulated cryptocurrencies”.
At the same time, Zuckerberg did not forget to emphasize that Libra will cooperate with supervision. "Both Facebook and the Libra Association plan to cooperate with regulators to resolve all concerns before Libra is launched."
The following is the full text of Zuckerberg’s open letter, compiled by Mars Finance APP (ID: hxcj24h):
We just shared our latest community update and quarterly earnings. Currently, more than 2.7 billion people use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger every month, and at least 2.1 billion people use our services every day.
Our top priority is to address important societal issues facing the Internet and our company. Delivering world-class privacy protections for our vision for the future as we realize our vision for a privacy-focused “digital living room” and today’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will be more important.
But I also believe that we have a responsibility to keep innovating and creating high-quality new experiences that bring people together in new ways. So I've been working on making sure we can continue to execute on our product roadmap while working to address big societal issues. You can see our latest updates on Facebook and Instagram, visions for new payment systems and currencies, new VR products, and the general goodness of our community.
As always, thank you for being on this journey with us. Our mission to bring the world closer together is a difficult but important task. Thank you for your role in making this happen. You can read my full story below.
This is an important quarter for us. Our community and business continue to grow, with more than 2.7 billion people using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger every month, and at least 2.1 billion people using our services every day.
This year, we will continue to focus on four priorities - making progress on big social issues, building high-quality new experiences, running our business, and communicating what we stand for more transparently. Today I will focus on our top priorities, but first I want to address the recent news that we have reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over privacy issues.
As part of the agreement, we agreed to pay a $5 billion fine. But more importantly, we're making some big changes to how we build our service and run this company. This will require us to dedicate significant engineering resources to building tools to review our products and the way we use data. It will also make our privacy control review process more in line with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sarbanes Oxley) requirements for public companies' financial controls, greatly improving our sense of responsibility. We must certify externally on a quarterly basis that we are fulfilling all of our privacy commitments. Just as our board of directors has an audit committee to oversee our financial controls, we will now create a new privacy committee on the board to oversee our privacy program and will work with an independent privacy auditor to report to this new committee and FTC reports. We will invite the Chief Product Privacy Officer, the most experienced leader in the product space, to report to me and manage our privacy program. We will also more closely monitor developers who access data through our platform. We expect these changes will collectively set new standards for our industry.
This is a major transition for us. Every day billions of people trust the services we create to connect with the people they care about. Privacy has always been important to the services we provide, and now it is even more important to our vision of the future of social networking. The point is, we build it into our system. Getting this right takes time, and I expect it will take us longer to launch new products, especially when we're just up and running. I also hope that, as we have done with security and integrity, we will continue to identify and address issues as we develop the system. But our goal is to create the same strong privacy protections as the best services we offer, and this settlement gives us clarity on what to do.
Now, Facebook's priority is to make progress on major social issues facing the internet, including privacy, elections, harmful content, data portability and more. In all these areas, I advocate for the government to create clearer rules, which will benefit the development of the Internet. I don't think it's sustainable for private business to make so many decisions on social issues without a robust democratic process in place. If appropriate regulations are not put in place soon, the list of disappointments in our industry will continue to grow.
This quarter, I've been in Europe talking to policymakers about how this can be done. I met with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss a framework for controlling harmful content. I believe that an effective public process led by democratically elected governments may emerge in Europe in this area, whereas in the US this relies largely on industry standards and self-regulation.
But we will not wait for regulators to step up independent oversight. We just released our third transparency report, which shows the progress we've made on many harmful content fronts, including hate speech and graphic violence, as well as areas where we still need to do better, like bullying and harassment. I think more companies should publish transparency reports listing the prevalence of harmful content on their services. This will help businesses and governments design better systems to deal with this problem. After next year, we'll be publishing these reports quarterly so that people can share responsibility with us as these financial reports require.
We are continuing to move forward with our plan to establish an independent Content Oversight Board. I think it's very important that people can speak freely about decision-making. Additionally, we are building a transparent system that people can trust. We've been working with free speech experts around the world and got a lot of public input on how to make this happen. We expect to have this oversight committee in place by the end of the year.
We will also continue to invest heavily in protecting elections, including more advanced measures, stronger efforts to stop organized disinformation, new advertising transparency tools, and more fact-checking partnerships. Our opponents are getting more sophisticated, but recent elections in the European Union and India show that our efforts are working. After the recent EU elections, the former president of the European Parliament said we had delivered on the promises I made in my testimony against election interference in the European Parliament, and online elections were cleaner thanks to our efforts. As the 2020 U.S. election approaches, we will build on these efforts to keep us ahead.
I know there's a lot to talk about in terms of policy, and I'm going to talk about our second priority: delivering new, high-quality experiences to our community. There are a few projects that I'm particularly excited about, let's talk about them:
First, we have a vision for the future of social networking: with a high priority on privacy. Start with secure, private and interoperable information. In the next 5 years, we will focus on achieving this goal on the basis of Messenger and WhatsApp.
On the Messenger platform, we re-wrote the app to be the fastest and most secure messaging platform in the world. In addition, we are working hard to develop end-to-end encryption algorithms and reduce permanent default settings. On this basis, we started to conduct exploratory experiments, trying to build a private social platform. For example, users write stories in different apps, and we can gather these ephemeral stories into one place. We're also working on features that allow users to watch videos together. Video chatting is rapidly evolving as a fundamental way we all communicate, and it could become a platform for users to communicate in more private ways.
WhatsApp already has strong privacy features, and we are more focused on providing all the ways users want to interact in the "digital living room". WhatsApp has become the most popular short story product in the world, and it is still developing well. Thousands of small businesses around the world use WhatsApp Business, and we're also developing new tools like the Product Catalog that entrepreneurs around the world can use for free. There are many small businesses that do not present themselves online, and those that use messaging platforms such as WhatsApp to communicate with customers. Both types of businesses are increasingly important, and our tools are critical for them.
The above content is related to commerce and payment. Commerce and payment are the businesses that we will strive to develop next. Both commerce and payments are huge and important areas. We are working hard in several major areas, such as Instagram Shopping, Facebook Marketplace, payment services across Facebook Apps, and our new project Libra, which we recently announced with 27 other companies. These efforts are important to our product experience and business. Once customers have connected their networks on social platforms, the big question is how to help customers create opportunities with the networks they have created? The best option is to do it through business.
Instagram Shopping will improve the browsing and shopping experience for users' favorite brands and creators, while also giving emerging creators a powerful new way to build a business and maintain a community. Facebook Marketplace provides a way for people to buy and sell items across a trusted network using their real identities. Currently, Marketplace is used by hundreds of millions of people every month. We are also developing new tools for people who contact businesses through WhatsApp Business and would rather communicate with a message than call a business.
Payments in particular excite me. In the long run, payment may be the most important. We will continue to test WhatsApp Payments in India and roll it out to other countries soon. In the future, we will allow people to use the same payment account to send money to friends and businesses on WhatsApp, shop on Instagram, or transact on Facebook. If transferring money could be as easy as sending a photo, it could create new opportunities for businesses.
More broadly, I believe we have an opportunity to help more people gain access to financial tools. Last month, we announced the Libra Association, in partnership with 27 other organizations, to create a cryptocurrency called Libra. It will be powered by blockchain technology. The Libra Association will be independent of Facebook or any other members we plan to support Libra in our services. The goal is to give access to a safe, stable, regulated cryptocurrency to the billions of people around the world who use services like WhatsApp but may be excluded from banking services. The possibilities are many, and both Facebook and the Libra Association plan to work with regulators to address any concerns before Libra launches. We have also collaborated with other potential members of the association to publish a white paper that clearly outlines the concept of Libra so that we can address these important issues in the open, and we are committed to working with policymakers to properly address issues related to Libra. related questions.
Next I want to talk about the third product, AR and VR. They are the computing platforms of the future, delivering better experiences than today.
This quarter, we launched Oculus Quest, our first wireless, all-in-one headset with complete freedom of movement. User reviews for this product are excellent and we are selling as fast as we can. More importantly, we provide users with a good experience. There is still a lot of work to be done if we want to develop the full ecosystem to build the VR and AR products of our dreams, but this is an important milestone. In just a few short years, we’ve gone from the first Rift ($600 and required a $1,000 PC to use it) to today’s Quest ($400), which makes the experience even better. There will be more innovations in the next few years, we have a platform now and we will continue to move forward in the future.
What makes AR/VR a better experience than traditional computing platforms is the ability to create a "sense of presence" where you actually feel like you're with someone, or traveling somewhere. This presence is essential for social interaction, and it is also important when we communicate with people. Although it may take longer than expected to achieve the goal, I still believe that we have made many contributions, and among these many contributions, AR/VR is one of the most important contributions.
