Mark Zuckerberg
Chief Executive Officer at Meta Platforms
All right. Hey, everyone and thanks for joining us today. We've made progress this quarter across a number of our priorities and our community continues to grow, more people use our services today than ever before. And I'm proud of how our products are serving people across the world during what has been a difficult period for a lot of people. I talked last quarter about some of the near-term challenges facing our business. Some are specific to Meta like our transition to short-form video, which doesn't monetize as well for now, but which we're quite optimistic about over the long term.
Some are specific to our industry, like signal loss resulting from Apple's iOS changes, which is a meaningful headwind, but we also expect that with the right technology investments we'll navigate okay over time. Other challenges are broader macro trends, like the softness in e-commerce after the acceleration we saw during the pandemic. The war in Ukraine, which is a real tragedy on a humanitarian level, has also had an impact on our business. We've been blocked in Russia and we decided to stop accepting ads from Russian advertisers globally. And we've also seen effects on business globally following the start of the war.
Taking a the step back, I want to share some thoughts on our business trajectory and operating philosophy. First, I think it's useful to level set on our business trajectory over the last few years, after the start of COVID, the acceleration of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth, but we're now seeing that trend back off. However, based on the strong revenue growth that we saw in 2021, we kicked off a number of multi-year projects to accelerate some of our longer-term investments, especially in our AI infrastructure, business platform, and reality labs. These investments are going to be important for our success and growth over time. So I continue to believe that we should see them through. But with our current business growth levels, we are now planning to slow the pace of some of our investments. Dave will give more detail in his commentary.
I also want to share how I'm thinking about investments and margins. Last year, we began looking at our business as two segments, family of apps and reality labs. On the family of apps side, I'm confident that we can return to better revenue growth rates over time and sustain high operating margins. In reality labs, we are making large investments to deliver the next platform that I believe will be incredibly important both for our mission and business, comparable and value to the leading mobile platforms today.
Now I recognize that it's expensive to build, it's something that's never been built before and it's a new paradigm for computing in social connection. So over the next several years, our goal, from a financial perspective, is to generate sufficient operating income growth from family of apps to fund the growth of investment in reality labs, while still growing our overall profitability. Now unfortunately that's not going to happen in 2022, given the revenue headwinds, but longer term that is our goal and our expectation. Of course, our priority remains building for the long-term. So while we're currently building our plans to achieve this, it is possible that prolonged macroeconomic or business uncertainty could force us to trade-off against shorter-term financial goals. But we remain confident in our long-term opportunities and growth.
Now with that to dive deeper on what we're seeing in three of our main investment priorities that I expect to drive this growth, Reels, ads, and the metaverse. Let's start with Reels. There are two key trends that we're seeing here. First, the increasing popularity of short-form video, and second the advancement of AI recommendations driving more of our feeds, rather than just social content. On the first point, since I started Facebook 18 years ago, we've seen multiple shifts in the media types that people use. And we started as a website, primarily with text then people got phones with cameras and the main format became images on mobile apps. In the last several years, mobile networks have gotten faster now video is the main way that people experience content online.
Short-form video is the latest iteration of this and it's growing very quickly. Reels already makes up more than 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram. Video overall, makes up 50% of the time that people spend on Facebook and Reels is growing quickly there as well. The second point is that while we are experiencing an increase in short-form video, we're also seeing a major shift in feeds from being almost exclusively curated by your social graph or follow graph to now having more of your feed recommended by AI, even if the content wasn't posted by a friend or someone you follow.
Social content from friends and people and businesses you follow will continue being a lot of the most valuable, engaging, and differentiated content for our services, but now also being able to accurately recommend content from the whole universe that you don't follow directly unlocks a large amount of interesting and useful videos and posts that you might have otherwise missed. Overall, I think about the AI that we're building not just as a recommendation system for short-form video, but as a discovery engine that can show you all of the most interesting content that people have shared across our systems.
In Facebook, that includes not just video, but also text post, links, group posts, reshares and more. In Instagram that includes photos, as well as video in the future. I think that people increasingly turn to AI-based discovery engines to entertain them, teach them things and connect them with people who share their interests. And I believe that our investments in AI, all the different types of content we support and our work to build the best platforms for creators to make a living will increasingly set our services apart from the rest of the industry and drive our success. And we're also finding that having an ambitious vision around building the world's discovery engine is attracting a lot of the most talented AI folks to work on this program.
Next, let's talk about ads. Sheryl will discuss this in more detail, but I want to highlight that this is also a large AI investment for us. There are three main trends to highlight in our ads business right now. First, we're managing headwinds from the shift to short-form video that I just mentioned. In the near-term this is a drag on revenue because Reels monetization is less than feed or Stories, but I expect that will improve over time. We see this type of media format transition, multiple times before, back in 2012, when we transitioned from desktop feed to mobile feed, we saw mobile feed growing massively, but not monetizing well yet and we've leaned into it. Went through some tough quarters and then it became the foundation of our business today.
Similarly in 2018, when people started using Stories more instead of feed. But Stories didn't monetize as well as feed yet, we still double down on Stories had another tough period, but came out stronger than ever. So we've run this play before and we're running it again now. We're focused on growing Reels as a major part of the discovery engine vision, and we expect that this expansion and engagement to shift from a short-term headwind to a tailwind at some point.
Now while this is playing out, we're also managing the headwinds from signal loss that we've discussed a lot recently. This means growing first-party understanding of what people are interested in by making it easier for people to engage with businesses and our apps whether that's completing purchases on Facebook or Instagram or messaging businesses on WhatsApp or Messenger. It also means, making sure that we build the best privacy-enhancing technologies to provide accurate targeting and measurement to advertisers even when purchases aren't happening within our apps. We're making major AI investments to build the most advanced models and infrastructure in the industry. Over the next year or two, we hope that this drives better recommendations for people, higher returns for advertisers, and increases our revenue growth even in the face of signal loss. Over the longer term, I think that these large technology investments can provide a sustainable competitive advantage over others in the industry.
The last priority that I want to discuss today is the metaverse, as while we're focusing on the biggest opportunities and challenges of today, I think it's important to build the foundation for the next era of social technology as well. The centerpiece of our strategy is the social platform that we're starting to build with Horizon. It's still early, but as we build out the experience the next focus will be on growing the community. We plan to launch a web version of Horizon later this year that will make it easy for people to step into the metaverse experiences from a lot more platforms, even without needing a headset.
I think the best experience will be on virtual and eventually augmented reality platforms and especially on our platforms like Quest, where in an upcoming release from the moment you put on your headset you're going to be embodied with your Meta Avatar and ready to interact in Horizon with your friends right from your Quest home. But making this available everywhere will mean that you can interact with anyone on whatever device or platform that they want to use. Our other focus for Horizon is building up the metaverse economy and helping creators make a living working in the metaverse. We expect to be meaningfully better at monetization than others in the space and we think that that should become a sustainable advantage for our platforms as they develop.
On the hardware side Meta Quest 2 continues to be the leading virtual reality headset, later this year we will release a higher-end headset code-named Project Cambria, which will be more focused on work use cases and eventually replacing your laptop or work setup. This premium device will have improved ergonomics and full color pass through mixed reality to seamlessly blend the virtual reality with the physical world. We're also building in eye-tracking and face tracking so that your avatar can make eye contact and facial expressions, which dramatically improves your sense of presence.
It's also a good example of why we're developing hardware in addition to the social platforms. We're bringing Horizon to more platforms, but if you want to be able to make eye contact or have your physical facial expressions just automatically get translated to your avatar in real time, then our hardware will provide the best metaverse experience whether you're playing a game or meeting with coworkers in Horizon work rooms. We'll share more details about Project Cambria and the months ahead, as we get ready to launch it.
I believe the areas that we've discussed today are the right places for us to be doubling down on our work. The questions we face are not going to be resolved overnight, but we've also faced a number of these challenges before. So I'm confident that we can navigate this period, while continuing to invest in our future. I'm grateful for everyone on our team who is executing on this important work for our partners and for our investors who believe in us and the future that we're building together. And now here is, Sheryl.