Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook lost daily users for the first time in 18 years
Facebook’s user growth has witnessed an upward tick since its inception. But on Wednesday when its parent, Meta, announced the quarterly earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2021, it said something unusual and unheard of. Meta said that Facebook lost daily users for the first time in 18 years.
Facebook’s daily active users dropped from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion compared to the previous quarter. The Verge notes that this could be owing to lack of relevance among young people. In addition to this, Meta reported a marginal increase in the daily active users in its family of apps which includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Meta’s family of apps had 2.82 billion users in the fourth quarter of the year, which is slightly above the 2.81 billion daily active users the company reported in the previous quarter.
The company followed this trend in case of the monthly active users as well. Meta’s family of apps had 3.59 billion users in the fourth quarter of 2021, which is marginally above the 3.58 billion users it reported in the previous quarter.
In addition to that Meta reported that while its advertising revenue from its family of apps increased by 13% across the globe, revenue from advertising in North America declined by 6% year-over-year. Also, Meta’s chief financial year David Wehner during the earnings calls said that revenue from Meta’s family of apps stood at $155 million, which is 8% down from last year owing to a ‘decline in payment revenue earned from games.
While Facebook’s daily active users may have declined, Meta is still a wildly profitable company. Overall, Meta reported a total revenue of $33.67 billion in Q4 2021, which is significantly up from $29,010 that the company reported in the third quarter of the year and $28,029, which the company reported in the final quarter of 2020.
Notably, this is the first time Meta gave a breakdown of its earnings and spending on the metaverse. The company said that Reality Labs, which includes augmented and virtual reality related consumer hardware, software and content operating, lost $3.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021. Details shared by the company show that Reality Labs has been constantly losing money in 2021. The losses for the first, second and third quarters stood at $1.8 billion, $2.4 billion and $2.6 billion respectively. “For the full year 2021, Reality Labs operating loss was $10.2 billion,” Meta noted.
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