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Clarifying Questions
Before diving in, I would want to align on scope, because “build something for the Olympics” can mean a dozen different products depending on what Mark is actually optimizing for.
Is the goal engagement, revenue, or a strategic bet on Reality Labs? Meta could build a lightweight feature to juice Feed engagement during the Games, a genuine new revenue line, or a flagship use case to justify the more than 60 billion dollars it has poured into Reality Labs since 2020. Each points to a different product.
Which Olympics, and on what timeline? The next Summer Games are Los Angeles 2028, on U.S. soil, in Meta’s own backyard, with a two year runway from today. I will assume LA28 is the target, since it gives us a real launch date and a home market advantage no other Games will offer Meta again for a generation.
Is Meta an official IOC sponsor, and does that change what we can build? Meta is not one of the IOC’s roughly 15 TOP tier sponsors (Coca-Cola, Samsung, Visa, and Airbnb historically among them), which means we cannot use official marks or broadcast footage without a licensing deal. I will design around organic, fan generated, and licensed highlight content rather than assuming rights to live broadcast streams.
Which apps in the family are in scope? Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, and Quest are all candidates. I will assume the product spans Instagram and Facebook as the primary content surfaces, WhatsApp and Messenger as the primary communication surface, and Quest as a long term differentiator, rather than a single standalone app.
What does success look like to Mark specifically? Is he asking for a PR moment, a durable new habit, or a proof point for the next earnings call? I will assume he wants a durable habit that also creates a visible Reality Labs proof point, since that combination is what would matter enough for him to personally ask this question.
For this answer I will assume the target is LA 2028, that Meta is not a rights holding broadcaster, that the product spans the existing Family of Apps plus Quest, and that success means both a two week spike in engagement and a durable increase in how people use Meta apps to follow live sport and creators year round.
Product Description
Meta was founded as Facebook in 2004, acquired Instagram in 2012 for roughly 1 billion dollars and WhatsApp in 2014 for 19 billion dollars, and rebranded to Meta in 2021 to signal its bet on the metaverse and Reality Labs. Today the Family of Apps reaches close to 3.4 billion daily active people and nearly 4 billion monthly active people across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, making it the largest audience footprint of any private company on earth. Roughly 98 percent of Meta’s revenue still comes from advertising, which means anything that increases time spent and content supply has a direct line to the P&L.
Threads has grown to roughly 300 million monthly active users since its 2023 launch and is Meta’s answer to real time, public conversation, exactly the format that live sport thrives on. Meta has also spent more than 60 billion dollars on Reality Labs since 2020, selling over 20 million Quest headsets cumulatively, while still posting multi billion dollar quarterly operating losses in that division. That combination, an unmatched audience plus an unproven hardware bet, is the strategic tension this product needs to resolve: any Olympics product should both move the core Feed metrics and give Reality Labs a legitimate, visible use case.
The competitive backdrop matters too. TikTok has become the default second screen for live cultural moments among under 30 users, and NBCUniversal’s streaming platforms set the digital high water mark at the Paris 2024 Games with roughly 30 billion streaming minutes across Peacock and NBC’s digital properties, the most streamed Olympics in history. Meta does not own broadcast rights, but it owns the social layer around the event: the conversation, the highlight clips, the athlete relationships, and the group chats where fans actually process what they just watched. That social layer is the part of the Games experience nobody else has built a great product for, and it is squarely inside Meta’s existing strengths.
Define Goal
The core problem is that the Olympics is the largest recurring live cultural event on the planet, and right now Meta’s apps play only a passive, secondary role in it: people watch elsewhere and merely react on Feed afterward, with no dedicated place inside Meta’s apps to follow, discuss, or relive the Games in real time.
The goal I want to focus on is making Meta’s Family of Apps the default second screen and fan community layer for the Olympics, converting passive post event reactions into real time, daily engagement across the 17 day Games window.
North star metric: Daily Olympic Companions, defined as people who engage with Olympics content (the Hub, a highlight, a watch party, or a creator post) for at least three minutes on at least one Meta app on a given day during the Games. This beats a simple reach or impressions metric because it captures habitual, cross app engagement rather than a single passive impression, and it is the number that would actually justify calling this a durable product rather than a one time campaign.
User Segmentation
The Casual Dipper: Tunes in for marquee moments only, the opening ceremony, a home country final, checks Instagram Stories for highlights, represents the largest share of Meta’s user base by volume but the shallowest depth of engagement.
The Devoted Fan: Follows a specific sport, athlete, or country closely, checks results multiple times a day, wants a real time community to react with, and is the segment most likely to build a 17 day daily habit.
The Athlete-Creator: Olympic and Olympic hopeful athletes, most with modest followings outside marquee sports, who rely on Meta apps for personal brand building, sponsorship value, and direct fan connection around the Games.
I will focus on the Devoted Fan, because they are the segment with the clearest daily habit forming behavior during the Games window, and building for them naturally pulls in Casual Dippers through shared content while giving Athlete-Creators a motivated, high intent audience to post to.
Pain Points
Synthesizing what we know from past Games cycles, creator feedback, and how people currently use Feed and Stories during major live events, the pain splits cleanly between the audience and the supply side.
