Neil Campling, head of TMT research at Mirabaud Equity Research, said: “Meta’s Q2 results show the company’s first ever revenue decline since it went public as Facebook – this probably explains why Instagram has changed algorithms in the last week and should probably be renamed ‘InstaTok’.
“In signs of shifting deckchairs on the Titanic – though most have already abandoned ship – Meta’s CFO is becoming its CSO, while the VP of Finance will become the CFO. Meta is blaming the macro landscape for its weak guidance rather than competition or privacy changes from Apple, but we think all three factors play a part.
“Mark Zuckerberg has also effectively called time on the importance of Friends. Facebook will begin relegating posts from Friends, as well as Pages and Groups that users follow, to their own tab called Feeds. And this is because the home feed will become a “discovery engine” full of “content we think you’ll most care about”. That could be re-interpreted as – it will be full of stuff our AI thinks is important and all the foundational ideas around the platform are to be forgotten in desperate attempts to stay relevant in TikTok’s world.”
