Yury Molodtsov

COO and Partner @ MA Family, where we run communications for tech startups and VC firms.

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Facebook Went Meta, But Google Isn’t Alphabet

Google called itself Alphabet for corporate reporting purposes, Facebook rebranded to Meta because their business had changed.

July 11, 2023

I’ve just watched a funny sketch about Threads from Ryan George (look him up!) and noticed one thing.

He was calling Threads an app by Meta.

When Zuckerberg renamed the company, people laughed at this as an attempt to avoid the negative publicity associated with Facebook, or a corporate reporting stunt similar to Google calling itself Alphabet.

There was one key difference.

Google barely uses this name for anything other than their corporate reports on one weird website and still makes its money from ‘Google’.

Meta actually uses its new brand throughout their products. It’s also safe to say it no longer focuses on Facebook, instead relying a lot on Instagram, which it used to implement new formats such as Stories and Reels, effectively blocking the potential growth of Snapchat and TikTok. And they’ve slowly been building out revenue-generating capabilities into WhatsApp, without making the app more complicated.

So they truly deserve a new name.

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