Hi, 3 charts for you today:
By now you've probably seen that the artist-formerly-known-as-Facebook has had a rough week, notching up the biggest one-day loss of value in the stock market's history.
Metaworse
Meta's 2021 revenue was up 37% on last year, and the company delivered a cool $47bn of operating profit — so you'd be forgiven for wondering why investors wiped ~$230bn of value from the company.
In short, Meta has a few problems:
The last one Facebook can at least do something about — and Zuckerberg is spending big ($12bn+ last year) to get the Metaverse here as soon as possible. The question is, how long until it becomes a significant business? It's anyone's guess, but judging by the stock's reaction yesterday, investors aren't feeling patient.
Road traffic fatalities have risen in the USA, with preliminary data showing 11,750 fatalities in the 3 months to September 2021 and 31,720 fatalities in the first 9 months of 2021. That's a 32% rise in just the last decade, and a 12% rise on last year.
Why are roads getting more dangerous?
It's not immediately obvious, considering the ongoing improvements in car safety and design, but blaming the pandemic is probably not a bad bet.
Stress from job losses and ill health, coupled with fewer cars on the road, may have encouraged more risk-taking behind the wheel. Indeed, that's been the conclusion from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with some behavioral research showing that speeding and traveling without a seat belt have been more common in the last couple of years. Drive safe, folks.
The big tech news flow just keeps coming this week, and last night it was Amazon's turn.
The e-commerce giant did a Google, not a Facebook, reporting an impressive set of results on all fronts — and revealing for the first time just how big its advertising business is.
Amazon's ads
Amazon isn't the first company you think of when you think of ads, but a careful search for any product on their website or app will reveal an enormous number of embedded ads. Want to get your product further up the page? Pay for a sponsored slot. Want to run a video showing your product off in between the search results? Buy an ad.
And a lot of people are doing just that.
Amazon made almost $10bn last quarter from advertising, which makes it a bigger advertising business than YouTube, which reeled in $8.6bn, and more than double what Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest make combined.
Separately: Snapchat had a wild day yesterday.
1) The opening ceremony for the 2022 Winter Olympics kicks off at 8pm local time in Beijing today, which will be the first country to use almost 100% artificial snow.
2) Interesting in-depth visual analysis of more than 382,000 news headlines, exploring how women are represented in written media.
3) The company behind the "Bored Ape Yacht Club" NFTs is reportedly in talks to raise $200m... at an eye-watering $5bn valuation.
4)Formatting, cleaning and validating data is a huge time sink, that could be spent improving your product, instead of hand-holding customers through their onboarding process. So Flatfile built a solution — a data importer that just works.**
5) The race to reconnect Tonga's 827km long communication cable is on, after the recent volcanic eruption.
6) This year's Super Bowl ads have hit new highs, with some being sold for a record $7 millionfor a 30-second slot.
**This is sponsored content.
