The world's largest social network isn't getting any bigger. Meta reported fourth-quarter profits on Wednesday, with financials that disappointed Wall Street enough to send the company's shares plummeting. As the statistics came in, shares of the corporation, which are still trading under the ticker name FB for the time being, fell 20%.
While Meta's latest quarter witnessed some predicted developments, such as Apple's iOS privacy rules weakening its ad revenue, it also revealed the surprising revelation that Facebook, Meta's key app, is no longer generating new users.
From the third to the fourth quarters of 2021, Facebook's monthly active users (MAUs) stayed constant at 2.9 billion. Worse, its daily active users (DAUs) dropped from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion during the same time period, a first for Facebook, which is notorious for its growth-at-all-costs strategy.
Some of this is self-evident. To put it mildly, Facebook is a mature product, and there are only so many individuals remaining in markets throughout the world for the firm to sign up. And the firm is putting more emphasis than ever on its "family" of applications, which includes WhatsApp and Instagram, which are newer products that are expected to have a long way to go before reaching that level of penetration.
The slowdown in user growth coincided with the announcement by the corporation formerly known as Facebook that it would rebrand as a "metaverse" firm, with intentions to direct its resources toward developing immersive virtual experiences.
The good news for Meta is that it continues to control the world's largest social graph. The bad news is that Even though a user slowness was predicted, it's just one more element that makes Facebook — and therefore Facebook's "Family of Apps," as Meta refers to it — appear more like a relic from the past than a glowing vision of the future.
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