GoKawiilI recently read this press release from the European Commission:
“The Commission’s investigation indicates that Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults.”
That made me think of the following quote from Mark Zuckerberg during Meta’s Q3 2024 earnings call on October 30, 2024:
“Improvements to our AI-driven feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram this year alone.”
Later, during a follow-up call for the same earnings report, Meta CFO Susan Li said:
“We’re still seeing strong returns as improvements to both engagement and ad performance translate to revenue gains. I think Mark mentioned that this year the ranking improvements we’ve made have delivered an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook, a 6% increase on Instagram.”
I think Zuckerberg and Li make the relationship pretty clear. They are not even trying to hide it — and I suppose it is not a secret at all: The more time users spend on Facebook and Instagram, the more money Meta makes.
Based on these quotes, Meta seems to be very good at optimizing for increased time spent on its platforms. In fact, it almost sounds as though they have a dial in their AI recommendation systems that they can turn to increase the amount of time users spend on their services.
I do not have the exact numbers, but it would not surprise me if the increase in time spent that Zuckerberg mentions — at Meta’s scale — translates into more than 100 million additional hours per day.
One hundred million hours a day.
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