Meta, on Wednesday, released its fourth quarter 2024 earnings report. The company reported strong financial results for the fourth quarter of 2024. 

Meta posted a profit of $20.84 billion, representing a 49% increase year-over-year. Revenue for the quarter reached $48.39 billion, up 21% from the previous year, surpassing Wall Street’s expectations of $46.9 billion.

The company’s earnings per share for the quarter stood at $8.02, exceeding analyst estimates of $6.76. Despite the impressive financial performance, Meta saw a significant increase in capital expenditures, which rose by 88% compared to the previous year, amounting to $14.84 billion for Q4. Full-year capital expenditures reached $39.2 billion.

Ad revenue remains a core driver of Meta's growth

Meta’s advertising business remains the driver of its revenue model. It continues to dominate, making up 96% of the company’s total revenue. 

In Q4, ad impressions across the company’s family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, increased by 6% year-over-year. The average price per ad also saw a rise, increasing by 14% for Q4 and 10% for the full year. 

This signals continued demand for advertising across Meta’s platforms. Nicola Mendelsohn, Head of Global Business Group at Meta, claims over 4 million advertisers use Advantage+ creative GenAI tools to power their campaigns. She says Meta is “building out more AI-powered ads tools under the Meta Advantage suite, to continue driving performance improvements for businesses globally.”

Growth in user base 

The company continues to see massive engagement across its platforms. Meta’s family of apps now boasts an average of 3.35 billion daily active users in December 2024, a 5% increase from the same time the previous year.

This growth was driven by its various platforms, especially Facebook, though Instagram's and Threads’ rise are noteworthy. In December, Threads hit 100+ million daily users. Mendelsohn says Threads is on track to dominate online discussions with 320M+ users monthly and 1M daily sign-ups.

She also said Reels get 4.5B+ reshares daily, and Instagram video time saw double-digit YOY growth in Q4. This shows Instagram’s role in Meta’s audience growth. Reports also suggest Instagram could surpass Facebook to become the largest U.S. social ad platform by 2025. 

This growth in Meta’s user base helped to maintain its dominant presence in social media advertising, though Meta platforms face increasing competition from X, TikTok, and newer platforms like Bluesky.

Meta's AI investments and plans

Meta’s AI initiatives also continued to grow, with Meta AI surpassing 700 million monthly active users, up from 600 million in December 2023.

The company is betting heavily on artificial intelligence to fuel future growth. “We continue to make good progress on AI, glasses, and the future of social media.”  “I’m excited to see these efforts scale further in 2025,” Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said.

Zuckerberg has also emphasized the company’s ongoing investments in AI technologies, with plans to allocate between $60-$65 billion towards AI infrastructure, including constructing a city-sized data center and procuring over 1.3 million GPUs. 

Despite its AI investments, the company faces increased competition with Google, ChatGPT, and emerging players like DeepSeek AI. These competitors are intensifying the race for dominance in the growing AI sector. Their moves could impact Meta’s future growth prospects. 

However, Meta remains committed to scaling its AI efforts, with Zuckerberg emphasizing that 2025 will be a pivotal year for the company’s AI progress. Zuckerberg has predicted that Meta AI will serve over 1 billion people in 2025.

“This will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts,” he said.

Q1 2025 outlook

For Q1 2025, Meta has projected revenue between $39.5 billion and $41.8 billion, representing an 8%-15% year-over-year growth. While the company did not provide full-year guidance, it has expressed confidence that the ongoing investments in its core business will lead to continued strong revenue growth throughout the year.

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