Since its launch 18 years ago, Facebook has only known constant growth. What began as a community project at Harvard University has grown into one of the largest and most prolific companies in the world. The now called Meta has become a benchmark in the industry, although one that has become a “cautionary tale” in recent years; and the numbers reflect it for the first time in its entire history.
During the fourth quarter of 2021, Facebook saw an unusual movement in its numbers: it lost daily active users. An unprecedented event in the history of the social network. In the last three months of 2021, Facebook saw a slight but steady drop in its community of daily users globally. The number decreased from 1,930 million, to 1,929 million.
This fall represented an instant loss of 200 billion dollars in the value of Facebook within the market, according to The Verge. Additionally, the platform lost approximately 1 million daily users in North America alone; region where the company has made its biggest profits through advertising. Of course, this fall translates into a decrease in users worldwide.
Likewise, in previous quarters the services of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have seen zero growth in their user base. This, in addition to being a reflection of the lack of relevance of the company within the youth market, also shows something darker; and it is that a name change in the brand is not enough to remove the stains on Facebook's past.
Photo by Timothy Hales Bennett on Unsplash
Meta and Facebook are still very profitable
Despite this drop, Facebook and Meta are still very profitable. In fact, the latter has achieved approximately 40 billion dollars in profits in the past year alone; a figure too large to process correctly.
However, it appears that Meta is spending billions on her quest to build her Metaverse; In this way, it seeks to establish virtual reality and augmented reality as the next standard in the technological world.
Reality Labs, the division responsible for the Quest VR, has reported a loss of 10.2 billion dollars in 2021. Likewise, the profits received barely reached 2.3 billion dollars.
Mark Zuckerberg has assured that the next generation of his virtual reality headsets will arrive later this 2022; and you'll be at “the top of the price spectrum.” Meta's CEO is currently focused on building his virtual empire; however, you will have to pay attention to the section on social networks, which is what makes it possible to allocate so many resources to the mission of the Metaverse.
