Meta Platforms Inc registered sharp profit and revenue in the 4th quarter of 2024, driven by high advertisement revenue on its social media applications. According to Meta’s Q4 earnings, the social media giant reported an ad revenue of $46.8 billion, up 21 percent from its Family of Apps. Within ad revenue, the online commerce vertical was the largest contributor to year-on-year growth, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li added. Meta’s Q4 total Family of Apps revenue stood at $47.3 billion, up 21 percent year-on-year.
According to Li, “On a user geography basis, ad revenue growth was strongest in the Rest of the World at 27 percent, followed by Asia-Pacific and Europe at 23 percent and 22 percent, respectively. North America grew 18 percent”.
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In Q4, Meta’s total number of ad impressions served across services increased 6 percent and the average price per ad increased 14 percent. Li said that the pricing growth benefited from increased advertiser demand, in part driven by improved ad performance.
“We are continuing to better personalize when ads show up, including the optimal locations in the depth of someone’s feed, to introduce ad supply when it’s most optimal for the user and revenue. This is enabling efficient supply growth,” Li added.
In the second half of 2024, Meta introduced a new machine learning system in partnership with Nvidia, called Andromeda. It enabled a 10,000x increase in the complexity of models the company used for ads retrieval.
Meta said that the increase in model complexity has led to ‘sophisticated’ prediction models better personalizing which ads to show to its users. “This has driven an 8 percent increase in the quality of ads that people see on objectives we’ve tested,” Li said.
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Additionally, Meta increased automation of ad campaigns with Advantage+, with revenue surpassing a $20 billion annual run-rate and growing 70 percent year-over-year in Q4.
Meta also deployed MITA to its ranking and recommendation inference workloads for ads and organic content.
“We’re continuing to see strong advertiser demand…particularly for AI-powered tools that are helping businesses maximize the value of their ad spend. We expect that we will invest in our suite of tools to meet the needs of advertisers,” Li said.