Meta shared its latest performance update. It reports a small increase in active users across its apps, as well as a big increase in revenue, in relative terms.

Still, the investments in next-level projects remain significant. Here are the latest numbers from Mark Zuckerberg's tech behemoth.

On the front, active users: Meta now says that it has 3.29 billion people using its apps -- Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads -- every day. This is a modestly slight rise from what the company reported in Q2 -- 3.27 billion.
Even at that, it's about 3 billion plus, whose scale it's nigh impossible to fully comprehend.

Of the world's estimated population at a little over 8.1 billion, Meta's apps are used by practically 40% of that number every day. Then subtract the 1.4 billion Chinese residents--where Meta is banned; that brings it closer to a half, so the spread of Meta's operation like this is pretty amazing, in this sense.

And it's still growing. Though its apps are undoubtedly at saturation point in most markets, Meta's still seeing more users join its apps, which promises well for its continuing potential -- and its core ads business.
Meta does not publish its ARPPs by market like it used to, but as you can see above, Meta's average revenue per user is growing and will grow again this quarter with the holiday surge in Q4.
Meta still derives the vast majority of its revenue from North America and Europe, though it continues to build revenue from its Asia Pacific market.

It's seen that post its impressive revenue result for the quarter at $40.59 billion.

So, while Meta is wasting a completely obscene amount of money in the development of VR and now AI, it's just milking cash out of its primary cash cow: by showing people more ads in its apps.

That same front, ad impressions across its apps grew 7% year over year for Meta, and average price per ad is rising as well, up 11% YoY-but the numbers likely aren't perfect, given the metrics used here.
Essentially, that translates to Meta showing more ads to more users in more places. Which translates into more opportunities for marketers to reach their target audience, but instead of decreasing the ad price by increasing the placements, it is seeing them increase. I can see why that's a positive for Meta's shareholders and its bottom line. Not so much for advertisers, though.

Maybe that will get better with more people signing up for Meta's Advantage+ automated ad campaigns, which fully automate ad placement, creative, even budgets and bidding if you choose. Meta says that these ads are delivering better results through enhanced behavioral understanding, and that, at least in theory, could help marketers optimize their ad delivery, and maybe reduce overall costs.

Or just deliver better results, making the more expensive ads worth it.

So, more users, adding to its already massive presence, and more revenue from ads, which, as noted, are also set to rise again in Q4. Everything seems pretty good for Zuck and Co.
Meta continues to lose money on VR and AI development, with its total costs and expenses rising by 14% year-over-year.
And that sinkhole only going to get deeper.
As per Meta:

We are now raising our full-year 2024 total expense range to $96-98 billion, from $96-99 billion. In Reality Labs, we will continue to expect 2024 operating losses to grow meaningfully year over year as we continue to make product development efforts and investment to further scale our ecosystem. We are now guiding our full-year 2024 capital expenditures to a range of $38-40 billion, from the prior range of $37-40 billion.

Apart from that, Meta projects "significantly growing capital expenditures through 2025" while setting up new AI datacentres and infrastructural facilities for other next-level projects.

Meta is perhaps the head of the class regarding VR, AR, and AI development, not to mention the scope of its data sets, the years it has spent conducting research on other related projects, and resources it already has. That doesn't come without a price tag, of course, and Meta still has to chew on those expenses, but none of these projects make meaningful revenue to date.

But they will. Or so we hope.

Meta's AR glasses are on their way to stardom as the company demoed its new AR device at the Connect conference last month.
At some point, functional AR is going to be a thing, and Meta, now, seems poised to gain out when it does take off and becomes more of a phenomenon. And with sales of its current Ray Ban smart glasses rising, the signals do point toward consumer demand for AR glasses being sizeable.

Another related area is also still lingering as a longer term play, and that is the metaverse; Meta's clearly paving the way forward on VR development while its AI projects are gaining traction. Notably, aside from the AI successes, it was again mentioned by Zuckerberg that the take up of its AI chatbot had reached the number one AI chatbot tool on the market.

Indeed, in his prepared statement, Zuckerberg attributed the company's performance to progress and momentum around "Meta AI, Llama adoption, and AI-powered glasses."

Some remain speculative bets, but the signals are there and all point to this becoming the new norm of connection and interaction in the near future. It's perhaps hard to imagine people all connecting in VR headsets at some point, but the progression makes sense and AI can play a significant part in that experience in helping users generate their own custom VR worlds.

As such, while Meta's current AI tools seem fairly generic, and don't add a lot to the experiences on Facebook of IG (the rising use of its AI chatbot is likely more indicative of Meta's scale than the bot's popularity), I also don't think that this is much of an indicator as to where Meta's headed on this front.

Thus, a decent outcome for Meta, or at least largely anticipated, with its advertising business holding up, and its costs of development still quite high. I'm not thinking there's likely to be a big market reaction against the company even with these projections of even more increases in cost as the future is still looking pretty rosy for the business.

But the compounded costs will spook some investors, which may send a short-term kickback.