In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one or more of Facebook’s Family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day.”
This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.
I don’t think they’re dying just because they change one metric. It might just be that the old metric no longer aligns with their goals.
They’ve probably realized it’s not feasible to put all eggs in one basket and try to collect all users in one big platform. Instead they might aim to build a more diverse set of platforms.
It definitely is dying. The younger people are dropping off because they don’t want to be on a social media network with their mum and their fucking nan.
That’s probably why they want to diversify. Different products for different age groups / target audiences.
Which they could also report on. The fact they’re removing a standard metric they’ve relied on, rather than relegate it, shows they have fear this metric is going to be detrimental to publish. You can fairly safely assume it’s going to go down. It’s no longer sexy, tik tok is killing it, and most that would be on it, are, and are discovering it’s not greatly beneficial to them and spending less time on it. It is the start of the decline. How long and how fast is the thing we do not know.
Yeah it starts weak. Gotta finish article to get it.
I feel like people just collectively forget how much Facebook owns now. WhatsApp, Instagram, (formerly) Oculus VR, etc