It was the year of living dangerously—and profitably. If you were watching the ticker for Meta Platforms (META) throughout 2024, you saw a company essentially trying to rebuild its engine while flying at thirty thousand feet. Mark Zuckerberg had already declared 2023 the "Year of Efficiency," but 2024 was where the rubber actually hit the road.
People were obsessively checking the meta earnings date 2024 calendar because every single report felt like a referendum on whether AI was a trillion-dollar gold mine or just a very expensive hallucination. Honestly, the tension was palpable. You had a CEO who had spent years being mocked for the "metaverse" suddenly looking like a genius because he pivoted to GPUs and Llama models at exactly the right moment.
The story of Meta in 2024 isn't just a list of numbers on a spreadsheet. It's about a massive gamble on infrastructure that is still making investors sweat today in 2026.
The 2024 Earnings Calendar: A Breakdown of the Hits
The company followed its usual rhythm, dropping bombs on the market four times throughout the year. If you missed the specific dates, here is the timeline of how it all went down:
- Q1 Earnings Date: April 24, 2024. This was the one that shook the room. Even though Meta beat expectations with $36.46 billion in revenue, they told everyone they were going to spend way more on AI than previously thought. The stock took a 10% dive the next day. Talk about a "tough crowd" moment.
- Q2 Earnings Date: July 31, 2024. Redemption. Revenue hit $39.07 billion, and the market finally started to believe that AI-powered ad targeting was actually working.
- Q3 Earnings Date: October 30, 2024. Meta clocked $40.59 billion. Zuckerberg was basically doing a victory lap on the call, talking about how Meta AI was on track to become the most-used assistant in the world.
- Q4 Earnings Date: January 29, 2025 (covering the end of 2024). They capped the year with a massive $48.39 billion revenue quarter.
Why the April 24 Report Was a Total Head-Scratcher
Most people get the Q1 2024 report wrong. They see the stock price drop and assume Meta failed. In reality, the company crushed it. Net income was up over 100% year-over-year. So why the panic?
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Basically, it was the "CapEx" problem.
Chief Financial Officer Susan Li raised the 2024 capital expenditures forecast to a range of $35-40 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $30-37 billion. Investors heard "spending spree" and hit the sell button. It’s kinda funny looking back from 2026, because that spending was exactly what allowed Meta to dominate the open-source AI space with Llama 3. At the time, though, Wall Street was acting like Zuck was buying magic beans.
Ad Dollars: The Secret Sauce Nobody Talks About
While everyone was staring at the AI headlines, the real work was being done by the boring old "Family of Apps."
Facebook and Instagram didn't just survive in 2024; they thrived. Ad impressions grew by double digits almost every quarter. More importantly, the average price per ad started climbing. By Q4 2024, the price per ad was up 14%.
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Meta's Advantage+ tools were doing the heavy lifting. Instead of a human marketer guessing which image would work better, the AI was making those calls in milliseconds. It’s the reason why, despite all the talk about Reality Labs losing billions (it lost about $16 billion over the full year), the company still ended 2024 with a mountain of cash.
Reality Check: The Metaverse Money Pit
Let's be real for a second. Reality Labs is still a giant hole in the ground where Meta throws money.
Throughout 2024, the division responsible for VR and AR continued to report staggering operating losses. In Q3 alone, it lost $4.4 billion. If any other company had a division losing $4 billion a quarter, the CEO would be out on the street.
But Zuckerberg has a "founder's control" grip on the company. He doesn't care. He’s betting that the Orion AR glasses—the prototypes of which we saw in late 2024—will eventually replace the smartphone. Whether he's right or not is still the biggest debate in tech, but in 2024, the ad business was so strong it just didn't matter.
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What You Should Actually Do With This Info
Looking at the meta earnings date 2024 data gives us a blueprint for how Big Tech operates now. If you're an investor or just someone trying to understand the landscape, here's the deal:
- Watch the Capex, Not Just the Profit: In the AI era, how much a company spends on chips (GPUs) is a better indicator of their future than their current quarterly profit.
- Ignore the "Metaverse" Noise: Until the losses in Reality Labs start shrinking—which hasn't happened yet—treat it as an expensive R&D lab, not a core business.
- The "Year of Efficiency" Never Ended: Meta ended 2024 with about 74,000 employees. That’s a far cry from the nearly 90,000 they had at their peak. They’ve learned to do more with less, and that’s a permanent shift.
The 2024 performance proved that Meta isn't just a social media company anymore. It’s an infrastructure company that happens to own some apps. If you're tracking their progress today, keep your eyes on the depreciation of those servers. That’s where the real story is hidden.
Actionable Insight: If you're analyzing Meta's current trajectory, look at the "Family Daily Active People" (DAP) metric. It hit 3.29 billion in late 2024. As long as that number stays north of 3 billion, Meta has the "data oil" needed to fuel their AI ambitions regardless of what the critics say.