MAGA-berg strikes again, we guess.
Meta crushed expectations in its Q4 earnings, reporting a record $48.39 billion in revenue—a 21% year-over-year increase. Advertising remains the company’s powerhouse, generating $46.78 billion of that total. Even as Meta expands into hardware with eyewear and headsets, ads still account for the vast majority of its business.
For the full year, Meta brought in $164.50 billion in revenue, up 23% from 2023—an incredible growth clip for a company of its size.
The surge was driven by Meta’s family of apps, where ad impressions grew 6% in Q4 and 11% for the full year, totaling 47.3 billion impressions in Q4 alone. At the same time, the average price per ad increased by 14% in Q4 and 10% over the year, signaling strong demand.
Meta isn’t just maintaining its dominance in digital advertising—it’s clearly accelerating.
According to Meta CFO Susan Li, AI was a key driver of the company’s success in both Q4 and 2024 as a whole. During the earnings call, she highlighted Andromeda, Meta’s AI initiative with NVIDIA:
“This is part of the ranking process where we narrow down a pool of tens of millions of ads to the few thousand we consider showing someone. The increase in model complexity is enabling us to run far more sophisticated prediction models to better personalize which ads we show.”
Meta claims Andromeda has driven an 8% improvement in ad quality based on objectives they’ve tested.
Li also praised Advantage+, Meta’s machine-learning tool for shopping campaigns that helps advertisers identify and target high-value customers across Meta’s apps through automation.
“Adoption of Advantage+ shopping campaigns continues to scale, with revenue surpassing a $20 billion annual run rate and growing 70% year-over-year in Q4.”
Why This Matters:
There has been ongoing discussion about whether Meta’s more laissez-faire content moderation policies under the Elon Musk/Donald Trump era might impact advertiser spending. While Q4 offers a limited sample, Meta addressed the issue directly on the earnings call.
When asked about it during the Q&A, Li said:
“We also haven’t seen any noticeable impact from our content policy changes on advertiser spend.”
She added:
“Our commitment to brand safety is unchanged, and we expect to continue investing in our suite of tools to meet advertisers’ needs.”
Given the scrutiny Meta still faces on this front, it’s no surprise that when they launched ads for Threads a week ago, they made a point to highlight their brand safety and suitability tools, while also teasing third-party verification.
Experts React:
The numbers were universally strong, and industry reactions reflected that:
Our Take:
Zuckerberg can’t be stopped. Do not bet against this man. This remains a business almost entirely driven by advertising (for now). What’s remarkable is not just that Meta continues to grow, but that it’s doing so at a rate few—if any—others can even get close to.
