Facebook stock (FB) is one of the casualties of a tech sell-off on Wednesday that so far has also claimed Netflix, Apple, Alphabet and even the poster child of retail, Amazon. However, analysts likely aren’t going to abandon Facebook or any of the other tech giants any time soon, even as investors rotate into other sectors such as financials and telecom.
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Facebook’s ad load still on the decline
In a note this week, Barclays analyst Ross Sandler offered a deep dive into the ongoing pricing trends at Facebook marked by the declining ad load and rising cost per thousand impressions. One of the key concerns many investors had regarding Facebook stock centered on the declining ad load, as management cautioned the Street about it. However, investors got over their fears pretty quickly and have pumped Facebook stock up fast all year long, right along with other big tech darlings.
Sandler noted that many of the main impression growth drivers are starting to mature for the core Facebook platform, but they’re still in the early stages in Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. He estimates ad load at about 15% for the core Facebook property, and he expects impression growth to remain in the low double-digit range in the medium term. He highlighted the key factors for the low impression growth as single-digit growth in daily active users in the Western market and video ads cannibalizing other News Feed ads.
Facebook has room to drive price
However, the Barclays analyst sees plenty of runway for growth in pricing for ad impressions on Facebook, noting that Google was able to boost prices “at a healthy clip” for more than 10 years through “like-for-like geo and form factor.” He believes Facebook can also drive impression prices higher via innovation in ad products paired with a positive shift in macro ad share dynamics.
He added that programmatic ads in the “open mobile internet” are being beaten by “closed ecosystems with better data and O&O inventory.” Further, he pointed out that Facebook announced big machine learning investments for ads, which he feels will only increase the runway for impression price increases.
