Meta Platforms META recently launched new features to improve its video and voice calling features in WhatsApp.
META unveiled features like 32-person calls, where users can talk with 32 people at once, four times more than the prior calling feature, in-call banner notifications, and colorful waveforms.
Other important features in WhatsApp include call links, using which users can easily invite people to a group call.
The newly launched features are expected to attract users for various uses like business meetings, online classes, and personal group chats. This will help improve user growth across META’s Family of Apps business and drive the top line.
Apple’s iOS changes have made ad targeting difficult, which has increased the cost of driving outcomes. Measuring these outcomes is tough. Meta expects these factors to hurt advertising growth in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Revenues from Family of Apps (99% of total revenues) in the third quarter of 2022, which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and other services, decreased by 3.6% year over year to $27.43 billion. The company expects revenues to fall further in the coming quarter.
This is due to a decline in its advertisement revenues, which represents 99.3% of Family of Apps revenues. In the third quarter of 2022, advertising revenues decreased 3.7% year over year to $27.24 billion and accounted for 98.3% of third-quarter revenues. The Family of Apps is the primary source of funding for Meta’s lofty metaverse dream, upon which the company is banking its future. However, due to falling Family of Apps revenues, META’s plans to fund the growth of its Reality Labs, which is responsible for building the metaverse, have taken a major hit.
Amid such a situation, Meta has been investing heavily in AI and launching features across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp to boost its user growth in its Family of Apps and increase top-line growth to meet its future goals of creating the metaverse.
Prior to the recent call development features in WhatsApp, Meta launched avatars on WhatsApp. The company used AI to create a digital version of users with various features, which creates a way of connecting with users and would be a small preview of how it would feel to communicate with others in an alternate reality of the metaverse.
