3 Things We Learned About Media Stocks from Meta vs. FTC - 4/16/25
Meta's opening statements contained key insights about the media landscape
This is a companion post to a video I just dropped last night on my YouTube channel, entitled “3 Things We Learned About Media Stocks from Meta vs. FTC”. While I recommend you watch it in full (or listen to the audio-only version on Spotify) I wanted to use the substack to cover the major story beats.
1) Social media users are increasingly choosing to watch content delivered by an algorithmic feed
Meta claims they do not have a monopoly in personal social networking, by demonstrating that users spend less than 20% of their time viewing content by friends. The algorithmic feed has been successful at entertainment discovery. By emphasizing entertainment, Meta argues TikTok and YouTube are competitors and thus Meta’s market share is lower than it seems.
2) Video is still gaining share in terms of time spent online, vs. static pictures or text
Much ink has been spilled documenting Metas “pivot to video”, but I was still surprised at how quickly watching video had become the dominant use case on Facebook. The trend shows now signs of abating.
3) YouTube is a major player in social media, despite it not being seen that way
In the video I cover how frequently YouTube comes up as Meta’s #2 or #3 competitor in the documents. I ended the episode with stats from Pew Research that quantify how integral YouTube is in the lives of 13-17 year olds.
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