No. of Recommendations: 7
Selling ads is not a moat. The business seems about as sans-moat as they come.
It is pretty moaty. Through its various properties, Meta has billions of unique daily users. They know what kind of content you like, how long you view each post or video, and so on. From that, they can build a profile of not only what you like, they know what you might like. That makes the Meta ad platform incredibly valuable to advertisers. If you search on Google for sunglasses, might see ads for sunglasses. But Meta might show you ads for sunglasses if it thinks you are the kind of person who might want sunglasses.
I mention sunglasses, because that happened to me recently. I'm not wanting or searching for sunglasses, but I am skier and I've been seeing ads for really cool ski sunglasses. I don't need ski sunglasses, but they are cool enough I kind of want them, even though I hadn't considered it unless I started seeing the ads. I've seen ads couple different brands, so they are definitely deliberating targeting me.
That's anecdotal to be sure, but their ads are effective enough they are on track to surpass Google in digital ad revenue. And by making their ads better, they can charge more per ad. So I think there is a pretty long runway here. I don't know what their margins are on ads, but it has got to be very high.
My viewpoint on the CEO is the same as yours, however. Not a guy I want to root for.
