3. Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors in Q2 2024: 219
GS’ Number Of Funds: 77
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is one of the biggest social media companies in the world. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it enjoys a sizeable user base of more than 3.2 billion people as of March. This provides Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) a wide moat in the social media sector, as it only has to improve its services to ensure user retention instead of having to focus on growth like other companies. Additionally, the keys to its hypothesis are its ability to ensure that users spend more time on its platform and the ability to monetize this time spent. Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) focuses on two broad based monetization strategies. The first is based on targeting its products like WhatsApp to business users and the second is using new technologies such as artificial intelligence to improve ad placement and drive up ad sales to advertisers. Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is also a key player in the AI race and has announced new features that it can monetize such as AI Studio which lets anyone on its platform create AI.
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)’s management shared details for Meta Studio during the Q2 2024 earnings call:
“And this week we launched AI Studio, which lets anyone create AIs to interact with across our apps.
I think the creators are especially going to find this quite valuable. There are millions of creators across our apps, and these are people who want to engage more with their communities, and their communities want to engage more with them, but there are only so many hours in the day. So now they are going to be able to use AI Studio to create AI agents that can channel them to chat with their community, answer people’s questions, create content and more. So I’m quite excited about this. But this goes beyond creators too. Anyone is going to be able to build their own AIs based on their interests or different topics that they are going to be able to engage with or share with their friends. Business AIs are the other big piece here. We’re still in Alpha testing with more and more businesses.
The feedback we’re getting is positive so far. Over time, I think that just like every business has a website, a social media presence, and an email address, in the future I think that every business is also going to have an AI agent that their customers can interact with. And our goal is to make it easy for every small business, eventually every business, to pull all of their content and catalog into an AI agent that drives sales and saves them money. When this is working at scale, I think that this is going to dramatically accelerate our business messaging revenue. There are a lot of other new opportunities here that I’m excited about too, but I’ll save those for another day when we’re ready to roll them out. The engine that powers all these new experiences is the Llama family of foundation models.”
