The Future is Meta , Alphabet and Advertising–not GPT, Open AI, or Crypto/Blockchain

Meta keeps going up, now at $220, on its way back to $370 (disclose: author and subsidiary owns FBL, an ETF that offers 1.5x leveraged exposure to Meta).

Here is the chart from earlier, from the post on March 1st, 2023, Update: Meta stock keeps going up, $350 soon, at $177:

And the chart now:

No one cares about those overblown layoffs. No one cares that the Metaverse is losing money or is a ‘money pit’. Those concerns are from 2022 and have passed. Meta management is streamlining costs with layoffs.

I believe the future of the internet and technology, overall, is online advertising. It’s not NFTs, blockchain, or Defi. It’s not Open AI or GPT-4,3, etc. Meta and Alphabet have among the highest profit margins on Wall St.; very consistent earnings too, with little variance. No shortage of brands, advertisers. CPCs (cost per clicks) are super-expensive and increase with inflation too, and especially for mobile US users, which is the most desired demographic. You cannot think of a better company when it comes to printing money. Same for Tesla, McDonald’s…the stuff I have been recommending here.

The future is not just online ads, but ads in smart appliances, car dashboards, TVs…everywhere and anywhere an ad can be displayed. Android apps are not uncommonly full of ads. Meta and Alphabet (especially YouTube) invest huge resources and recruit the world’s smartest minds in the singular pursuit of maximizing ad clicks/views and evading ad-blockers.

[Bitcoin is recovering a bit, at $30k, but it’s gonna drop as always.]

It’s assumed that the smartest people are doing AI. Yes, some are, but ads are a way bigger and more important industry than Chat GPT, and also there is plenty of AI involved with serving/optimizing ads. Meta and Alphabet combined are worth $1.5+ trillion is because of the lowly, hated ad; by comparison, Open AI is still only $30 billion valuation. AI is found in almost everything now, like Tesla’s self-driving cars. It’s not like Open AI is the only big player in AI.