The numbers
$42 billion: Meta’s Q1 revenue, up 16% YoY
$41.4 billion: Meta’s ad revenue, up 13% YoY
$16.6 billion: Net income for January-to-March period
3.4 billion: People now using at least one of Meta’s apps each day
$16.6 billion: Net income for January-to-March period
The water cooler talk
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on a call with investors, touted the company’s ambitious AI investments, with a focus on deploying AI agents—technology that performs tasks on behalf of humans—in the coming years. He envisions this technology playing a crucial role in making advertising a significantly larger contributor to global GDP.
“AI is generating better creative options for many businesses. That is really redefining what advertising is into an AI agent that delivers measurable business results at scale,” he said.
Zuckerberg also highlighted business messaging on Messenger and WhatsApp as the next major growth pillar for Meta, with plans to scale its ad business beyond Facebook and Instagram. WhatsApp now boasts more than 3 billion monthly active users, including over 100 million in the U.S., while Messenger is used by over a billion people each month.
In addition, Meta launched its ChatGPT rival app, Meta AI, with Zuckerberg predicting advertising potential on the platform.
On the tariff front, Meta has seen reduced ad spend from Asia-based ecommerce exporters, according to chief financial officer Susan Li. She attributed the slowdown to the upcoming end of the de minimis exemption, set to expire May 2.
“A portion of that spend has been redirected to other markets, but overall spend for those advertisers is below levels seen prior to April,” Li said, noting uncertainty about the impact on Q2.
Meta also does not expect ads on Threads to drive meaningful revenue growth in 2025.
Key quotes
“The next few years, I expect that just like every business today has an email address, social media account, and website, they’ll also have an AI business agent that can do customer support and sales, and they should be able to set that up very easily into our business platforms,” Zuckerberg said.
