Meta

Meta’s business model centres on operating large-scale consumer social, communication and content platforms, then monetising the resulting user engagement and data via business-facing tools. In its Family of Apps segment, it offers self-serve and managed advertising solutions that allow advertisers to target and measure campaigns across social feeds, stories, short-form video and messaging surfaces. Value is created for consumers by providing free communication and content services, and for advertisers by offering reach, targeting, measurement and conversion outcomes within a closed ecosystem.

In the Reality Labs segment, Meta designs and sells virtual-reality hardware and runs a curated application and content store, generating hardware margin and a revenue share from developers’ content sales. It also offers business messaging products such as the WhatsApp Business API, which enterprises use for customer support, notifications and marketing. Overall, Meta combines an advertising-funded media platform model with a hardware-plus-content ecosystem, underpinned by its control of user identity, social graphs and distribution at global scale.

Meta Platforms, Inc. is a US-based technology company that operates a family of consumer internet services and an associated virtual-reality hardware and software business. Its primary segment, Family of Apps, comprises large-scale social and communication services including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, which serve as consumer social networks, messaging and content discovery platforms.

Meta generates the vast majority of its revenue by selling digital advertising inventory across these services via auction-based systems to brands, agencies and direct-response advertisers. Additional revenue comes from its Reality Labs segment, which sells virtual-reality headsets and related content, and from paid business communication services such as the WhatsApp Business API. Its direct paying customers are businesses, marketers, developers and enterprises purchasing advertising, hardware and platform-based services, while consumers use the core apps largely free of charge.