Today is not a good day for Facebook. For the first time in Facebook’s 18-year-history, the social media giant saw its daily active users drop.
That’s not all. The announcement of Facebook’s first-ever drop in user numbers triggered a dramatic drop in stock prices by more than 20 percent for Meta Networks, the recently rebranded social media empire that is now an umbrella over Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The drop in stocks wiped out around $200 billion from Meta’s stock market value.
The drop in daily active users is a bad sign for the company and shows the reality of competition from social media rivals such as TikTok and YouTube. There was a fall of about 1 million users, dropping from 1.930 billion daily users to 1.929 billion.
Meta warned of slow revenue growth and said that it’s not only due to competition, but also that advertisers are cutting spending.
It’s all bad news for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is feeling the full force of investors’ concerns. This was the first set of quarterly results since the rebrand into Meta, and there are not only fewer users, but the lack of users was concerning enough to make stocks tumble a whopping 20 percent.
The main decline in users came from Africa and Latin America. This is concerning for Meta because it desperately needs to grow in locations outside of its main market, which is the U.S. But growth also fell there as well.
Younger users have ditched Facebook for rival social media apps, especially TikTok. In 2021, TikTok eclipsed Google for the first time ever as the most visited webpage.
It’s a new direction for Zuckerberg and the Facebook empire. Facebook has historically always been a growing platform, with numbers only ever going in one direction. But over the past few years, growth stalled in the U.S. as well as Europe. This could be compensated for by a rise in users in the rest of the world. But with the rest of the world now ditching Facebook for other social media apps, there may be worse yet to come for Meta.
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