The most famous thing about Field of Dreams, the Kevin Costner movie in which a farmer is urged by a disembodied voice to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, is the line “if you build it, they will come”. That’s not exactly what the voice says, but it doesn’t matter. The principle is now lodged in the popular imagination — and that of high-spending Silicon Valley executives.
Mark Zuckerberg is a true scholar of Costnerian thinking, and with some reason. Meta Platforms’ second-quarter earnings showed that his company’s enthusiastic spending on artificial intelligence over the past couple of years was winning real money from customers — primarily advertisers who use Meta products, including Facebook and Instagram, to sell their wares.
The numbers were impressive enough to send Meta’s shares up more than 10 per cent on Wednesday, adding almost $180bn of market capitalisation. The price it achieved per ad rose 9 per cent year on year, even as the number of ads served increased by 11 per cent. It expects revenue for the next quarter of up to $51bn, where analysts had forecast about $46bn. Meanwhile, users are spending 5 per cent more time on Facebook, and 20 per cent more on Instagram video products.