Tech is getting a boost from AI ad tools. Some companies are being left behind
Meta and Alphabet both reported sales and earnings that beat Wall Street's expectations, but the strength in digital ad spend was notable.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that AI helped imbue "greater efficiency and gains across our ad system," thus contributing to the 22% year-over-year increase of second-quarter sales that hit $47.52 billion.
Meta finance chief Susan Li also told analysts during a follow-up earnings call on July 30 that the online ad market appears to have improved since April.
In April, Li noted that Asia-based online retailers pulled back on their digital ad spending amid broader macroeconomic uncertainty due to President Donald Trump's tough tariffs and the closing of the de minimis trade loophole.
This quarter, Li said there's been a noticeable "improvement" with those Asian-based ecommerce firms, which have increased their digital ad spending on the platform along with small, North American-based advertisers.
"We generally expect another quarter of healthy advertising demand," Li said about the advertising pickup.
Gil Luria, the head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, said that while there is still broader macroeconomic uncertainty, "today, digital advertising in general, is doing well; It is simply an extension of the fact that the consumer is still strong."
"There's optimism that consumer spending will hold up and therefore all the downstream markets will hold up," Luria said.
"I think one of the things that its earnings taught us was that you can spend a lot of money on AI when your core business is doing well, and especially when your core business has been already benefiting from the investments that you've made in AI," Jasmine Enberg, a vice president and principal analyst for eMarketer, said about Meta's second quarter.
The continued jaw-dropping pace of AI spending also doesn't seem to be slowing any time soon.
Alphabet added an extra $10 billion to its 2025 forecast for capital expenditures, now pegged at $85 billion, while Meta raised the low end of its capital expenditures for the year to come in between $66 billion and $72 billion instead of $64 billion and $72 billion.
Investors showed no signs of trepidation about Meta and Alphabet's massive AI spend because those companies' overall sales continued to rise.
Outside of the tech giants, Reddit reported strong second-quarter sales of $500 million, representing a 78% year-over-year increase that helped lift the company's shares as much as 20%.
"They kind of rose back like a phoenix and had some extraordinary results," Luria said about Reddit, which saw its shares plummet over 15% in February after it reported weaker-than-expected user numbers due to a Google search algorithm change.
Reddit's blockbuster quarter contrasted with similar-sized peers like Snap and Pinterest, which both reported lukewarm quarterly earnings this week.
Snap's second-quarter sales grew only 9% year-over-year and it missed Wall Street's estimates on global average revenue per user, a metric that refers to how much money the company derives from each user.
Contributing to the miss was a botched update to Snap's advertising platform that hurt the company's "topline growth," Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in an investor letter.
The Snapchat parent on Wednesday also added Reddit to its list of competitors in its latest 10-Q filing on Wednesday, indicating a potential, burgeoning rivalry.
Meanwhile, Pinterest shares sank over 10% on Thursday after it reported second-quarter earnings that missed on earnings per share.
Pinterest finance chief Julia Brau Donnelly told analysts during an earnings call that the company is still noticing some tariff-related concerns, "and broader market uncertainty" as it previously indicated in May.
Unlike Meta, Donnelly said that "Asia-based e-commerce retailers pulled back spend in the U.S.," underscoring how some advertisers gravitate toward bigger online ad platforms amid any signs of global economic uncertainty.
"There's very little room for mistakes or missteps," Engberg said about the quarterly earnings reports from smaller tech firms like Snap and Pinterest.
WATCHTech growth rates are remaining robust.
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