Earnings Labs

Meta Platforms, Inc. (META)

Q3 2019 Earnings Call· Wed, Oct 30, 2019

$670.20

-0.18%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+1.81%

1 Week

+1.75%

1 Month

+6.08%

vs S&P

+3.62%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, my name is Mike and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Facebook Third Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] This call will be recorded. Thank you very much. Ms. Deborah Crawford, Facebooks’s Vice President and Investor Relations, you may begin.

Deborah Crawford

Analyst

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Facebook's third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO; Sheryl Sandberg, COO and Dave Wehner, CFO. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call we may present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The press release and an accompanying investor presentation are available on our website at investor.fb.com. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Mark.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Justin Post from Bank of America Merrill Lynch

All right. Thanks, Deborah. Thank you all for joining us today. Before we get started, I want to talk about the announcement we just shared that Sue Desmond-Hellmann is going to be leaving our Board to focus on her health and other commitments. Sue has been a wonderful and thoughtful voice on our Board for six years and I'm deeply personally grateful for everything that she has done for this Company. This was a good quarter for our community and our business. There are now around 2.8 billion people using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger each month and around 2.2 billion people using at least one of our services daily. The Facebook app had a particularly strong quarter, including in the US and Canada. We also recently released - now that we estimate that more than 140 million businesses, mostly small businesses are using our services each month to grow, create jobs and become social hubs in their communities. This has been a busy quarter on a lot of fronts. We launched a number of new exciting products like Facebook Dating in the US, which is doing quite well; Threads for Instagram, our camera first experience to share with your close friends, Facebook News, our dedicated product for news that we built in partnership with news publishers, and we introduced Horizon, a new social experience for VR. We also released hand-tracking technology for Oculus and Oculus Link. So your Quest is basically now a Rift too. We're making progress building out the private social platform across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct, and we have multiple exciting initiatives around commerce and payments that we're moving forward from marketplace to Instagram Shopping to payments in WhatsApp and continuing our discussion on Libra. This has also been a busy quarter on the policy…

Sheryl Sandberg

Analyst · JPMorgan

Thanks, Mark, and hi everyone. It was a strong quarter for our business. Ad revenue grew 28% year-over-year and we saw strong performance in all regions and on both Facebook and Instagram. Mobile ad revenue was $16.4 billion, contributing approximately 94% of total ad revenue. We know we have a very important responsibility to keep people safe and continue innovating to help businesses of all sizes grow. We're working hard to demonstrate our commitment to the billions of people and the 140 million businesses who use our platforms every month. I want to start by talking about some of the protections we're putting in place to keep people safe. As Mark said, the 2020 elections are only a year away. We're continuing to invest in people and technology so that we can disrupt networks of bad actors, find and remove that content and stop fake accounts before people see them. We're also making political advertising on Facebook more transparent than anywhere else. In 2018, we started requiring ads about social issues, elections or politics to get authorized before running. And this quarter we strengthen those requirements to ask for even more information. Helping people understand who is trying to influence their vote without becoming arbiters of political truth ourselves is critical to empowering people and keeping them safe. We're also holding ourselves to a higher standard when it comes to protecting people from discrimination on Facebook. Earlier this year we reached an important settlement with the National Fair Housing Alliance, the ACLU, the Communication Workers of America and others to restrict targeting options for housing, employment and credit ads. Now advertisers in these areas are required to use a new buying process and by the end of the year people will be able to view all current housing ads in…

Dave Wehner

Analyst · JPMorgan

Thanks, Sheryl, and good afternoon everyone. Let me begin with our community metrics. We were pleased with the growth of the Facebook Community this quarter, daily active users reached 1.62 billion, up 9% compared to last year led by growth in India, Indonesia and the Philippines. This represents approximately 66% of the 2.45 billion monthly active users in September. MAUs grew 8% or 178 million compared to last year. We're pleased with the growth trends in all regions, including the US and Canada. In terms of our Family metrics, we continue to grow and estimate that on average around 2.2 billion people use at least one of our apps on a daily basis in September and around 2.8 billion were active on a monthly basis. As a reminder, the Family metrics are best estimate of our de-duplicated audience across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. We believe that these numbers better reflect the size of our community and the fact that many people are using more than one of our services. Over time, we anticipate Family metrics will play the primary role in our disclosures and how we talk about the Company. Turning now to the financials. All comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Q3, total revenue was $17.7 billion, up 29% or 31% on a constant currency basis. As expected, we saw a deceleration in our constant currency revenue growth versus the second quarter. Had foreign exchange rates remained constant with the third quarter of 2018, total revenue would have been approximately $297 million higher. Q3 total ad revenue was $17.4 billion, up 28% or 31% on a constant currency basis. In terms of regional ad revenue growth, APAC and Rest of World were strongest and grew 35% and 34%, respectively. APAC got more of a revenue…

Operator

Operator

We will now open the lines for a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth from JPMorgan.

Doug Anmuth

Analyst · JPMorgan

Thanks for taking the question. First off, Dave, can you just help us understand a little bit more on the 4Q on the revenue decel, just some of the product improvements from last year that you're lapping. And then also just how you're thinking about the ad targeting headwinds considering that they didn't seem to show up in the 3Q numbers that much. And then, Mark, can you just talk about Instagram Shopping. How that's ramping and how you're thinking about expanding that initiative as you're going deeper into 4Q here. Thanks.

Dave Wehner

Analyst · JPMorgan

Hey, Doug, it's Dave. Yes, on the Q4 outlook, we are lapping a few different product optimizations. We made a couple of those that I would cite as optimizations and how the ad auction operates, which can have an impact and also an increase in ad load on IG feed and stories. And so, as I noted, these are factors that are largely Q4 related. And given that we would expect that 2020 revenue deceleration to much less pronounced. And then in addition, in Q4, and over the longer term, we do continue to expect to face ad targeting related headwinds and uncertainties. And I just go back to the three factors that I cited in the past that the regulatory landscape is continuing to evolve. So for example, when GDPR came into effect, we saw a number of people who opted out on allowing us to use context from the apps and websites they visited for ad targeting. And then the second factor is just we're seeing proposed changes from the mobile platforms that are more oriented towards privacy which could affect targeting and measurement and make that more difficult. And then finally, we are rolling out our own product changes such as the recent launch of OSA that's our user control on what data stored on Facebook activity. So I'd say those three factors still factor in. And when it comes to this, I'd say the majority of the potential signal loss is still in front of us rather than behind us. So I think those headwinds are still real and out there and that factors into our outlook as well.

Sheryl Sandberg

Analyst · JPMorgan

I'll take the Instagram Shopping question. We think there is a big opportunity over the long run here because 90% -- more than 90% of Instagram users are following a business. But on the shopping product itself, it is still very early days and we're working to improve the product and it's quite small. We started testing in Q3 shopping ads, the idea that shoppers can tap on ad, see a product description page and can purchase from the business' mobile site. Again, we think interesting product, but very nascent. Our overall commerce efforts go across not just Instagram but Facebook and all of our properties, and our goal is to make it more convenient and accessible and secure for people and business to browse, discover, buy and sell. I think we have been and continue to be a great place for people to browse and discover. That continues to drive the great, great majority of our business and well for the foreseeable future. But as we can help people reduce friction and close that loop, we think that's a good opportunity for people and for our business.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post from Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Justin Post

Analyst · Justin Post from Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Great, thank you. Maybe one for Mark and one for Dave. First on Watch, with all the OTT launches, it's kind of interesting. Can you talk about your usage of the Watch tab and what your overall professional content strategy is and whether it could start contributing revenues going forward. And then Dave, you mentioned the headcount growth accelerating. Could you give us some of the areas where you'll be adding headcount next year. Thank you.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Justin Post from Bank of America Merrill Lynch

I'm happy to talk about Watch for a little bit. I don't think we have any new status to share on this, but I mean overall we rolled out the tab for -- almost the first year we were really tuning it just to make sure that it would be retentive and very valuable for people. So they are in general -- the way we think about this stuff is, we try not to put something in front of a lot of people unless we're confident that they're going to find it useful and want to come back and use it multiple times and we can put a lot of things in front of people not to try it once, but we want to wait until things are kind of retentive and useful. So we got to there on Watch, it's growing well and that is -- so we're kind of still now focused on continuing to make it better and continuing to grow it. The premium content part of it, yes, I think the right way to think about this is almost as marketing to help people try out the tab for the first time. There are some good tent pole pieces of content that people really love that they come and they check out the product to experience that and then they stay for a lot of the other valuable content that's in there and that might not be talked about as much in the news. So, that's I think the right way to think about that.

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Justin Post from Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Hey, Justin, it's Dave. On the 2020 expense outlook, that includes headcount growth and also other expense growth sort of around infrastructure is a big factor as well. We're seeing that large CapEx build over the last several years flowing through depreciation and cost of revenue. So that's a driver of the growth as well. We are planning to reaccelerate or accelerate hiring in 2020 and that's really going to be focused on the important priorities of the Company. So that includes our privacy, safety and security investments. So we are investing a lot in privacy related to building the products and also working on complying with the FTC settlement. And then we're continuing to invest heavily in our innovation investments. That includes building products around Facebook and Instagram and continuing to improve those but also in new developing areas like AR/VR. So those are big factors in growth. And then we are planning on growing non-headcount related expenses as well like marketing and ultimately that will depend on how the ROI of those investments play out over time.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan from UBS.

Eric Sheridan

Analyst · Eric Sheridan from UBS

Thanks for taking the question. Maybe two, if I can. You gave us a little bit of color on Asia and Rest of World and why those had accelerated. Any additional color you could give on sort of the US and Europe or things you saw in the quarter that might have impacted the growth rates in those regions. And going to the Q4 guide, is there any color you can give us on how different regions of the world might be impacted against the mid to high single-digit deceleration of the levels of Q3 just so we have a better understanding of where you might be seeing some of those tougher comps or product optimizations play out on a global scale. Thanks so much.

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Eric Sheridan from UBS

Thanks, Eric. We're not breaking out specific regional impact, but let me give you some color around the acceleration in areas like Rest of World and APAC. APAC benefited from some of the product optimizations we did in the quarter. One thing that I would cite there, it's just how we manage ad load and balance some of our internal promotion units and sort of use it as internal house spend and the nature of the changes that we made in that had a more pronounced impact in some of the lower ARPU countries and unlocked more impression growth in those markets. So that was one of the factors. And then Brazil was particularly weak last Q3. So that had a good compare on a macroeconomic basis. In terms of the Q4 guide, not anything I would say specifically there. In the US, we will have a shorter holiday season, it's hard to know how that's going to play into it just given the late arrival of Thanksgiving, but I think overall the product optimizations that we're comping against in Q4 were global changes. So I think we're going to see the deceleration impact all regions.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley.

Brian Nowak

Analyst · Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley

Thanks for taking my question. I have two. The first on -- Mark, you mentioned Facebook app in particular had a strong quarter in the US and Canada. We can see it in the DAU numbers. We would be curious to hear about any specific products or changes or types of behavior you're seeing that really is driving the stronger engagement on Big Blue. And the second one, you have so many monetization I guess call them almost products to come. You talked about commerce and IGTV and Stories and Discover. Just as we sort of think about the timing of these, which one or two of those are you sort of most excited about to drive the business into 2020? Thanks.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley

Yes, I can take the first one on the Facebook app. It's a bunch of different places in which I think we made improvements. I would say globally especially outside the US, we saw good improvements around -- engagement around video. In the US, I think it was less video and more core feed engagement. So it's a bunch of different factors and I think we're seeing good engagement from a bunch of cohorts in the US, which is good. But of course we are highly penetrated in the US and Canada. So we would expect that to bounce around. So I think we saw great growth this quarter. We are quite penetrated. In terms of monetization opportunities, I can speak to that and Mark can add color if you would like. Obviously -- and Sheryl would like to add color as well. So, Stories is obviously one of the big growing areas for us and continues to be a big driver. We're also seeing opportunities around Instagram Explore going into 2020. We're now monetizing with that product and more advertisers are buying from it and then Sheryl is going to jump in and I think give some additional color.

Sheryl Sandberg

Analyst · Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley

Yes, I think in terms of our core advertising products and growth, it's worth really remembering that our core feed products for Facebook and Instagram are growing nicely and well. And we see a lot of opportunity to continue that growth. Definitely, Stories is a big part of the success. We've had I think a lot of success moving advertisers to where people already are. That's what happened with mobile ads. People weren't really doing mobile ads and we helped them get there. I think we've taken our experience on how to help advertisers migrate to the right places and been able to do that even more quickly in new formats like Stories. So of our more than 7 million advertisers, we already have 3 million advertising across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger Stories. And I think that's because we learned that we have to do a lot to help them move. So for example, advertisers can now buy Stories across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger all at once. We had automatic default templates which convert your feed ads into vertical Stories format and this quarter we just launched customizable templates, which help you save time and resources. So as we have to help advertisers move, we've learned how to make those investments in making the formats really easy, the measurement really easy, the buying really easy. Now, the mix to Stories is a big opportunity for us. Stories still does monetize at the same rate as a News Feed right now. So, we're keeping an eye on that. But the growth over the long run is pretty exciting. And I think our ability to help people migrate is something that we're able to prove out quarter over quarter.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney from RBC Capital Markets.

Mark Mahaney

Analyst · Mark Mahaney from RBC Capital Markets

Mark, who would you want to add to the Board or what sort of voice would you want to add to the Board that would be particularly helpful for you in the Company now. And then, David, could you talk about that Stories monetization gap, to what extent it's closing the rate at which it's closing. Thank you.

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Mark Mahaney from RBC Capital Markets

I can take the Stories monetization gap first and give Mark the second. So on that, I think what we're continuing to see with Stories monetization is, that is a product that's experiencing a lot of impression growth. And whenever we have a product that's experiencing high impression growth that puts pressure on the auction in terms of price. And we've also seen good impression growth on the feed side as well. So if you noted in the commentary when I talked about the drivers of impression growth, I listed feed impressions from Facebook first. So I think that's also showing good growth. So I'd say overall not a big change in the gap there and overall the impression growth is really the story for Stories and will remain the story we think for the near future. So that will not be a price-driven revenue growth story, but rather an impression growth, revenue growth story.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Mark Mahaney from RBC Capital Markets

Yes, on Board members, there are a lot of great leaders who serve on our Board, who have served on our Board. It's been an incredible benefit running the Company. We face a very wide range of issues here from really hard technological problems to issues scaling large organizations to of course a lot of now major regulatory and social issues and having different people or different perspectives can help us navigate that and provide both advice and oversight to make sure that we're doing a good job is really important. And I just want to add one more time, Sue really did an amazing job on our Board and I'm sad to see her go and she has really helped shape a lot of what we do and I'm just incredibly grateful, perfect to mentioned it here.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley from Deutsche Bank.

Lloyd Walmsley

Analyst · Lloyd Walmsley from Deutsche Bank

Thanks. Two questions, if I can. First you mentioned a little bit earlier the OFA feature that you rolled out this quarter in just a few markets. So can you give us a sense of what you're seeing in terms of early user response to this, how it may be impacting targeting in those markets. And then secondly, you've disclosed on occasion kind of daily search query volumes, you're now expanding ad inventory more into search. So I'm wondering if you can give us an updated sense of query volumes and then how we should think about ad coverage ramping over time within search given a lot of the searches on the platform today are people searches and how we should think about that. Thanks.

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Lloyd Walmsley from Deutsche Bank

Sure, I'll take those. In terms of the OFA roll out we initially launched that in August and we've been continuing to slowly roll that out globally and we'll be doing that over the next several months through the end of the year. And we're rolling it out globally on a percentage basis. We've seen a positive reception to having this feature as an option. It's too early to share adoption and we'll just have to see kind of over time how that gets picked up and how that gets adopted. But I think it's too early to really share much about it. In terms of search, we are showing ads in Marketplace in FB search results. But really the vast majority of searches on Facebook are for people, not topics related to retailer e-commerce. So, it's very early days. And from a revenue perspective, it's not material at this point.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali from SunTrust.

Youssef Squali

Analyst · Youssef Squali from SunTrust

Thank you very much. Two questions from me as well. Mark, with GDPR now over a year old, how has it impacted your business relative to your own expectations and how does that inform your views about the potential impacts from CCPA in 2020. And then on VR, it seems like your vision has taken a bit longer than expected to materialize. Can you speak to the gating factors there and do you feel that now that Quest is at $400 and there seems to be a lot more content out there, we're going to see potentially an acceleration in adoption. Thank you.

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Youssef Squali from SunTrust

Youssef, I'll take the question. I think it was about GDPR and how that's gone relative to expectations. We've seen adoptions around people who are opting out of allowing us to use context from the apps. And so I'd say that was largely within the range of expectations that we saw and it is having an impact and the people who are opting out are seeing less relevant ads. And obviously that will impact both, I think, the quality of the experience in terms of the ads they get and also the monetization for us. So I think that is kind of playing out as we expected. CCPA, I think is still a work in progress. So we're watching the developments on that closely. That's the California Consumer Privacy Act, and that has many similar provisions to GDPR, but it's a different line. We're going to have to watch how that evolves, but we do think that that's a factor that we're watching closely and we'll just have to see how that develops. I think, Mark, question was on Oculus.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Youssef Squali from SunTrust

Sure. And then also just add something on privacy. I think it's very important that there is federal privacy legislation. GDPR encodes a lot of important principles and in order for businesses to be able to operate, especially starts to get started and keep the market competitive, you want to make sure that there aren't 50 different regulatory frameworks that companies need to follow. I mean, we could handle that if we needed to, we're a big company. But in terms of for the market overall, I just think it would be a lot better if we had a very clear set of rules at the federal level on privacy. So we'll continue to try to work with folks to try to do what we can to help there. On VR and AR, you're right. This is taking a bit longer than we thought. And I'm still optimistic, I think that the long-term vision and the reasons why I thought this -- we're going to be important and big are unchanged. So we're seeing a lot of people use these products and love them and because of that I think that we're still going to get there. Obviously, the fact that it's taking a little longer than we thought, it cuts both ways. On the one hand, that of course means that the future might be a few years further out and that it might be more expensive to develop because we'll be funding this for a bit longer until it gets there. But on the other hand, from our perspective, we're not a company that's traditionally done hardware or built operating systems or these kind of products. So every year that we get to practice and get better and build our brand around Oculus in terms of building the best products that we can in this space, I just think that we're going to be better off when this is really ready to be a completely mainstream thing with hundreds of millions of people using it. You're right that Quest is growing and doing quite well. We are selling them as fast as we can make them, the demand has been strong and the content is starting to pick up both on the AAA, really high quality side and some of the [indiscernible] stuff that I think is quite good. I'm very excited about what we're seeing and very optimistic about the future.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ross Sandler from Barclays.

Ross Sandler

Analyst · Ross Sandler from Barclays

Great. So guys, just a question on the 2020 rev outlook, calling for a more modest deceleration. So, Dave, I guess what are some of the headwinds, tailwinds that you might see in 2020 that would cause the deceleration? Is this a function of lapping some of the impression acceleration you're seeing now in some of these innovations that you've had in '19 or is there things like the drawing on both the late stage VC funding market and some of those companies potentially coming back on their marketing plans. Is that a material factor? What are some of the other headwinds for next year? And then one housekeeping question is, the 4Q mid to high single-digit decel, is that referring to constant FX growth rate or is that reported US dollar growth rate that you're expecting the decel from? Thank you.

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Ross Sandler from Barclays

Yes, sure, Ross. It's a reported number that we're giving that on, on a mid to high-single digit deceleration from the reported growth rate. I don't think there should be a huge difference in them, but we're giving it on a reported basis. So in terms of the deceleration, we continue to expect deceleration into 2020, but it would be, we believe, more moderated and the reasons for that, that we expect the deceleration. We do continue to see these ad targeting related headwinds, which have been playing out slowly, but we think are still in front of us. The majority of potential signal loss on targeting is still in front of us. And that's the three factors that I cited, the regulatory landscape, potential platform changes and then the adoption of our own products like OFA that we're just rolling out now. So all of those will play into the potential deceleration of revenue growth in 2020. Obviously, we're lapping what's been good performance in 2019 where we've made a lot of product improvements and growing off a large base. So I think we are experiencing deceleration from that perspective. The specific sort of high level of deceleration going into Q4, we're signing the specific optimizations that we're lapping in Q4, which were more significant.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs.

Heather Bellini

Analyst · Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs

Great. I just wanted to go back to the opening remarks about the 35,000 people. I think you mentioned that you have working on safety and is that you're spending more, I think your budget for this area you said is more than it was back when you went public in 2012. So, maybe about $5 billion. I just was wondering if you could share with us your view on how much you're using, you talked about AI in the past being helpful here. How long does this have to be as resource-intensive from a people perspective or do you see the ability over time as with technologies like AI potentially helping you to get more leverage out of this existing budget, so maybe you don't have to continue to ramp it as quickly as your user base and engagement continues to grow. Thank you.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs

Sure. So over time we may not have to ramp it as much, but I don't foresee any time in the near future that AI is going to make it to that if the cost comes down. In general what we have to do is we use computers and AI for what they're good for which is looking at a lot of content very quickly and making quick judgments. And we have teams of people doing what people are good for which is making nuanced human judgments. And so you build the computer system, in that way they can flag and get rid of some of the worst stuff, and so they can flag for human review, some of the stuff that's borderline and then there's just so much content flowing through the system that we do need a lot of people looking at this. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs

And Heather, I would add that when you're using systems to look at content, when you're using AI machine learning systems, it's a real benefit to have actual people looking and tagging that content, classifying it because it helps those machine learning algorithms be able to learn what they're looking at. So you actually have -- we do have actually ramped in people who are doing the tagging and classification. So there is actually expense related to AI that's on the human side in the near-and medium-term as well. So very much in line with what Mark said. Over time it's an opportunity to maybe slow down the growth, but it's not going to change the dynamics in the near term.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Colin Sebastian from Baird.

Colin Sebastian

Analyst · Colin Sebastian from Baird

Thank you. Mark, maybe a bigger picture question. I'm wondering how you think about the increase in scrutineer oversights impacting your or the Company's ability to explore new services, new markets and ultimately remain competitive or is that not really a factor at this point? And then on payments, related to the WhatsApp test, I'm just wondering how far off in the distance do you think we are from seeing a connected payments ecosystem across the family of apps and do the growing pains for Libra impact the timing of that. Thank you.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Colin Sebastian from Baird

Sure. So look, I think some of what you might be asking about are the antitrust questions that are out there in the investigations and I can talk a bit about this, if it's helpful. I mean, look, I think a lot of the antitrust questions that are out there that are going to be about our acquisition of Instagram, right. And some of that -- how that might affect other things that we do today, but -- so there's going to be a lot of scrutiny of that acquisition in particular. And so I think if it's helpful I'll go back to what it was like at the time there when we did that acquisition just to kind of lay out how we were thinking about this. And at the time of course in some way we considered Instagram to be a competitor, but we've always thought that the better way to target -- to think about Instagram was that it's complementary to Facebook and what we're doing. Back in 2012, people generally didn't think of Instagram as competing with our core service. We thought about Instagram in the context of this new mobile camera space that was complementary. If you remember, back then we were building the Facebook camera app. There were lots of different services. There is a camera plus VSCO Cam, Socialcam, Viddy, Snapseed. There were even apps like PAS [ph]. They were all in the same space. We thought that mobile photos we're going to be important. So we were competing there with things like Facebook camera, but we ultimately thought that we were going to do better work if we were building with Instagram. But if you remember at the time, Instagram was focused on helping people take photos, apply creative filters and share…

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Colin Sebastian from Baird

About commerce.

Colin Sebastian

Analyst · Colin Sebastian from Baird

Yes, sorry. Yes, how far off is a connected commerce -- payment ecosystem.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Colin Sebastian from Baird

Sure well, I mean we do a lot of stuff around commerce. I mean, we have Facebook Marketplace is probably the most advanced and hundreds of millions of people use that to buy and sell things. Instagram Shopping of course a lot earlier. But we're very optimistic about it. But we are optimistic on the timeframe of years, right not driving next quarter's business. And then in terms of payments, there's multiple approaches that we're taking there. We're of course working on payments in WhatsApp. We have our test going in India. It's the test really shows that a lot of people are going to want to use this product. We're very optimistic that we're going to able to launch to everyone in India soon, but of course will share more news when we have that. And we also differentiate between payment systems that are built on top of the existing financial infrastructure like what we're trying to do with WhatsApp payments or when we make payments in Instagram Shopping, and our work with something like Libra that is trying to build some new technological infrastructure for financial services. So they're working on different thing. If Libra works, then it will be able to make certain kind of payments whether they're micropayments or remittances across borders. We'll be able to be done much faster and much more affordably than it can happen today on top of existing rail. So I remain optimistic that we'll be able to do work there, but we're just working across a lot of different fronts here because this is a huge space. It's one of the areas that I am most excited and optimistic about for the years ahead. There's a lot to do, which is why we have a lot of different projects that we're trying to push forward here.

Sheryl Sandberg

Analyst · Colin Sebastian from Baird

Operator, we have time for one last question.

Operator

Operator

Your last question comes from the line of Michael Nathanson from Moffett Nathanson.

Michael Nathanson

Analyst · Moffett Nathanson

Thanks. Let me as one of Mark, one of Dave. So, Mark, I mean, a couple of quarters ago we asked you about the embracing or maybe paying for news, and it looks like you've struck some deals with some publishers. Can you talk a bit about that pivot and what the rationale is and maybe how big is that vision for any news. And then for Dave, there's reports tonight about Cognizant who I guess [indiscernible] been the Facebook screeners, Head of AI is dropping a contract. Do you expect to bring that job in-house or is that a third-party outsourcing opportunity?

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Moffett Nathanson

Dave, do that and then I'll wrap on,

Dave Wehner

Analyst · Moffett Nathanson

Yes. Thanks, Michael. No plans to bring that in-house. We obviously have a lot of people in-house who work with the third-parties on that front. But we have a wide variety of different partners beyond Cognizant who work with us. So there is no change in model planned on that front. But we continue to obviously invest heavily in that work and we'll continue to work with other partners in that space.

Mark Zuckerberg

Analyst · Moffett Nathanson

All right, so on news, there are two things that I'm quite excited about here. One is just building a dedicated product space for high quality news. And the second is having a business partnership with news publishers that I think can be sustainable over the long term. So I'll talk a bit about both of them and why I think they are important. We'll start with the product, which is if you look at the Facebook app overall, for a lot of years the app was synonymous with News Feed, right, the main tab in the app and of course everyone who uses Facebook pretty much uses News Feed. And one of the questions that we had was, there are of course a lot of things that some people want to do, but not everyone and we weren't sure if we were going to be able to build a secondary tab in the app that could be meaningful even if most people didn't use them. But we started building things like Marketplace, that is a tab that and even if the majority of people on Facebook don't use it, it's still hundreds of millions of people are using it. So that's really, that's really valuable. And we built Watch. We're seeing a similar trend there. It took us a little while to really get it to work the way that we wanted, but now it's growing quickly, that's going to be hundreds of millions of people who are using it. We rolled out Facebook Dating. I don't know if that will be many hundreds of millions of people just because of the size of that market, but it's going be very useful for tens of millions of people around the world, maybe a hundred million or more. And we…

Sheryl Sandberg

Analyst · Moffett Nathanson

Great, thank you. Thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your time and we look forward to speaking with you again.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.