The quarterly results report of the parent company of Facebook, Meta, published a few hours ago has shown a surprising fact: for the first time, the company’s growth is stagnating worldwide. Beyond this, Facebook lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history. Specifically, half a million less in just three months (the last quarter of 2021).
Even if continues to have 1.93 billion people connecting every day and there has been a slight annual growth (only 5% which shows a stagnation), the Meta shares fell by 20% after this news was revealed. The loss was greatest in the African and Latin American regions.
Developing markets are the main objective of the company to achieve its growth, since its platform is well established in markets with higher incomes such as Europe (where it has already been losing users as well) and North America and this data, with losses in their target countries, it seems predict that your situation may worsen.
We must remember that this social network created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 went from being a small project to have 1,000 million active users in 2012 and 2,000 million just five years later.
As you can see in the graph shared by Will Oremus on Twitter, in the last quarter of 2019 there were 1,657 million active users; to end 2020 it was 1,845 million: and in the last quarter of 2021 it was 1,929 million, below the figure for the previous quarter.
MEGA GUIDE IMPROVES FACEBOOK SECURITY and PRIVACY
The Metaverse has started slow
Just yesterday the company presented its Instagram avatars for the Metaverse, which is supposed to be its great revolution in social networks. But the avatars, as we could see, are quite improvable, not very revolutionary and with very simple designs featuring a torso, a head and few customization options.
His new ambition is off to a slow start. Facebook yesterday demonstrated for the first time that its investment in virtual and augmented reality hardware, the suite of products the company calls the metaverse, is a money-losing proposition. Facebook Reality Labs, the hardware division of the company that builds the Oculus Quest headset, lost 3.3 billion dollars in the last quarter of the year, despite bringing in $877 million in revenue.
The company lost $10 billion investing in Reality Labs (ala oculus) during 2021.
Earnings out goal: Company lost $10 billion investing in Reality Labs (oculus wing) over 2021.
Even still, the company is massively profitable making nearly $40 billion in net income over the past year.
— rat king (@MikeIsaac) February 2, 2022
Facebook blames Apple
Still, the company is profitable, earning nearly $40 billion in net income last year. most of the money comes from targeted advertising on your primary social network, which is still Facebook, although this part of the business hit a snag in 2021: Tim Cook’s decision at Apple to allow its iPhone and iPad users to prohibit tracking by social networks.
In November we already published that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had lost almost 10,000 million dollars for not being able to track us on the iPhone, according to a study by The Financial Times. Meanwhile, Apple has gained a lot from this measure, hindering competition.
As it has done in the past, Facebook has blamed its results during the last quarter on the measures adopted by Apple to improve user privacy. Sheryl Sandberg, during the conference where the results were presented, said that like other companies in this industry, “we have faced headwinds as a result of changes in Apple’s iOS”.
According to the directive, “as we described last quarter, Apple created two challenges for advertisers. One is that the targeting accuracy of our ads decreased, which increased the cost of getting results. The other is that measuring those outcomes has become more difficult.”