Meta ad revenue jumps 27% in Q1 2024

Meta’s ad revenue increased 27% in Q1 2024, a significant improvement over the 4% growth it saw in the same quarter a year ago. 

Advertising revenue was $35.6 billion in Q1 2024 compared to $28.1 billion in Q1 2023. This success helped drive total Meta revenue to grow 27% year-on-year from $28.6 billion in Q1 2023 to $46.4.1 billion in Q1 2024.

• “If you look at our two end-to-end AI-powered tools, Advantage+ Shopping and Advantage+ App Campaigns, revenue flowing through those has more than doubled since last year,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

By the numbers. Across Meta’s “family of apps” (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp), year-over-year:

• The average price per ad increased 6%
• Ad impressions increased 20%.
• Daily active users increased 7% to 3.24 billion.

Meta search advertising. Could Meta AI bring in search advertising dollars at some point in the future? Zuckerberg was asked this question during the earnings call, given Meta AI assistant now includes search results from Google and Microsoft Bing:

• “We’re not working on search ads or anything like that. I think this will end up being a pretty different business.”
• “I do think that there will be an ability to have ads and paid content in Meta AI interactions over time as well as people being able to pay for, whether it’s bigger models or more compute or some of the premium features and things like that. But that’s all very early in fleshing out.”

AI investments. Meta is accelerating AI investments, with plans to spend between $35 million and $40 billion this year. Also:

• “Tens of millions of people” have tried the Meta AI assistant since being pushed into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps last week.

Threads. With 150 million monthly active users, Threads now has more users than X. This is likely why Meta is reportedly looking to launch ads in Threads later this year.

Why we care. Meta had strong advertising growth, perhaps a good sign for the industry. We’ll know more as Google and Microsoft are set to report earnings today.