Speaker 2
And I think that what they're saying is they mistakenly sort of position that as we over hired because of that. And as a result, as pandemic has scare quotes ended, meaning people are starting to go back into reality and vaccines are more common and things have changed. People are
Speaker 1
leaving their house.
Speaker 2
People are going outside. And that is, I think that's not insane. I think that's part of it for sure. And like there are, with some reporting that we've done, just there are people at these companies who don't actually have as much to do anymore, and perhaps there are too many bodies at some of them. So that's the script. I don't think it's insane, but to what you're alluding to, I don't think that's everything,
Speaker 1
I guess. It is. There are definitely some hive mind going on. They all centered around cuts of 6 to 10 percent. Magically, I'm old enough to remember the.com cuts where everyone sort of announced that 1% cuts at the start and 20% was the new flat for a while. So everyone sort of circles around that. And each of these companies has a different story, and we can talk about some of them. But there is some pushback on this narrative. Ben Thompson from Certectory has been pushing on this. And some other folks as well saying, well, wait a minute, you hired a lot of people during COVID, but you didn't double in size. You hired a lot of people, but you're a really big company. So if you just sort of hire at the rate you're normally hiring at, or you increase it a little bit, it's a lot of people. But did you really over hire that much? Did you really change your company fundamentally because of COVID? Is there something else going on? Are you hearing that? Yeah.
Speaker 2
I mean, look, to your point, too, like, let's just take meta Facebook's numbers. They're the people I cover closest and, you know, their user numbers went up the last quarter, even after a temporary blip, blip, and not by an equitable amount. There are two billion DAUs, daily active users on Facebook alone. A lot of their revenue was flat to, you know, a little bit lower, but still very high. And like, it's not like their business was halved, you know, it's not like everything went away. So like, again, I don't think it's wholly dismissable. I think that they did hire a lot of folks, but like, there are other sort of, I think macroeconomic factors as well as specific sort of acute tech economy factors that are probably harming some of these businesses more than usual. And as Ben Thompson sort of homes in on and Eric Sufert, or C. Fert, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name, as sort of mobile analyst, who's been really sharp and really focused on Facebook for a very long time. One of the underlying theories is that digital ads and like companies propped up on digital advertising have been more harmed than folks have caught on to with changes to Apple's privacy tracking and iOS sort of, and how that has sort of impacted the businesses that use these ad supported platforms in a much
Speaker 1
sort of larger way than might have been before before all this happened. Apple announced, and I think people listening to this know some of this, I've written about it, Apple announced it was going to change the way basically that app developers, i.e. Facebook in particular, but anyone who's got an app, could track users across the internet that has the effect of making their ads much, much less precise, harder for advertisers to figure out if someone saw an ad and acted on it, and really has undercut a big chunk of that economy. It's different than cutting out advertising altogether, and there's a debate about how much effect that has had, but Facebook has been very loud about saying, this is absolutely affecting us. Although now they've been saying we think we're through the worst of it.
Speaker 2
Probably not helpful to keep yelling about that, especially right now if they don't want their shares to tank. No, and
Speaker 1
also their view, I mean, I talked to folks there when this is rolled out, and they said, yeah, we're modeling this is going to slow our growth a bit, and they underestimated that, I think they believe that. It also, you can also argue, there's some political benefit to them saying, hey, look what Apple's doing to us. But they also believed that I think still do believe, like we're Facebook, we're meta, we're huge, people have to advertise with us. It's going to take us a while to figure out better versions of this, but we're going to recapture some of this, and I think they believe they're getting some of that back.