The Financial Post reports in its Thursday edition that Meta shareholders are about to start receiving a dividend for the first time. A Financial Times dispatch to the Post reports that investors will receive a piddling 50 U.S. cents per share each quarter, starting next month. This equates to an annual dividend yield of just 0.42 per cent. This sounds tiny. It is tiny. However, this form of microdosing sent out a big signal for the company and potentially for the wider market. Meta encapsulates the grinding decline in dividend culture in U.S. equity markets over the past two decades. Few of its shareholders will have missed these disbursements over the past 10 years, during which Meta's publicly traded stocks have delivered gains of almost 700 per cent. Instead, share buybacks have provided the primary way to return capital to shareholders. Meta bought back more than $90-billion (U.S.) worth of stock from 2021 to 2023 and intends to buy much more, and at a pace that far exceeds the scale of the new dividend payouts. FT says analysts welcomed the move as a "coming of age" and a signal that Mark Zuckerberg's empire would tilt in favour of staid, sensible rewards for shareholders over ventures in the metaverse.