Ask HN: Startups, 0 Stability – Is It Time to Move on from Tech?

   echo url=https://www.ft.com/content/83250c1a-18f0-47fb-9748-257e9c848aa1 \
   |curl -K/dev/stdin -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Java) outbrain" > 1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm

ed_mercer · 1d ago

https://archive.md/mFmNp

belter · 1d ago

The billions Meta seems to make on ads are a complete mystery. I don't know anybody with a Facebook account and asking around the new generation no kids or teenagers have Facebook accounts.

Is this a case of companies just spending money on ads, but not actually checking the effectiveness of their ad spend?

Can anybody find some forensic analysis of these numbers or who are the customers? Intuitively they are just so hard to believe.

malshe · 1d ago

I suspect it is Instagram more than Facebook. Instagram is still quite popular among younger generations.

gdulli · 1d ago

I'm not on Instagram but I sometimes hear people talk about it like it's a store. Some video podcast I watched just last night had a woman say she recently bought something "from Instagram".

nunez · 1d ago

If you see anyone wearing Alphalete, NOBULL or hype wear like Darc Sport, then you are looking at people who bought Insta-popular brands

hnfong · 1d ago

> Is this a case of companies just spending money on ads, but not actually checking the effectiveness of their ad spend?

If you have an online advertising budget and there's only two companies to spend it on... well you don't really have a choice do you?

ed_mercer · 1d ago

FB use is declining in the US/Europe but rapidly growing in developing countries. It’s massive.

belter · 22h ago

Ok thanks to everybody that replied, but these numbers are so out of whack I decided to make a back of envelope forensic analysis.

Meta says they have 3.48 billion people use their apps daily. That's 62% of ALL global internet users (5.65B total). Lets do a reality check...

YouTube (2nd most visited site): 122 million daily users.

Amazon (largest e-commerce): 310 million total active users..

Meta claims 28.5x more daily users than YouTube!

Its also a geographic impossibility....

China has 1.1B internet users, but Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are all BANNED there. India has 881M internet users. Meta somehow has 3.48B daily users while being blocked from the world's largest internet market?

Also I see a revenue paradox. For Meta's Q2 2025: $47.5B revenue ÷ 3.48B users = $4.55/user/month while Amazon: ~$700B annual ÷ 310M users = $188/user/month

So Meta claims to capture 75% of social ad dollars but users only spend 41.8% of social media time on their platforms. Their ad revenue is completely disconnected from actual usage.

Conclusion: The numbers don't add up. YouTube has transparent metrics showing 122M daily users as the #2 website globally. Meta claiming 28x that number while being banned in China is absurd. They're likely counting every WhatsApp ping, dead Facebook account, and Instagram bot as a "daily active user" across all their apps.

Marketing fiction at its best.

manquer · 1d ago

Instagram and WhatsApp and maybe even Threads are used fairly frequently by a large number of people .

Meta as a company is doing quite well, Facebook the product which is closer to a ghost town filled with Al slop.

Facebook has been probably is much smaller contributor of revenue than other business lines for years so their further slide has not impacted revenue as much .

gniv · 1d ago

Do they make money from WhatsApp?

manquer · 1d ago

Not a lot directly today, but as a data source for targeting other platforms ads