The company is also facing ongoing scrutiny from government regulators around the world over antitrust concerns and content moderation.ĭespite the drop in user growth and missed targets, Facebook is still making plenty of money. Meta also reported lower than expected profit and revenue growth, which it says was driven in part by inflation and Apple’s new ad-tracking privacy restrictions that limit Meta’s ability to sell ads. and that’s why we’re optimistic about the future. He went on to say, “I think overall engagement will grow. “What’s unique is that TikTok is so big as a competitor already, and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate off of a very large base,” said Zuckerberg. TikTok said it has 1 billion users as of September of last year, and was the most downloaded app in the world in 2021, according to app analytics firm Apptopia. Later on the call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spelled out the elephant-competitor-in-the-room, TikTok, by name. Facebook has an estimated 350 million users in India, which is its biggest market. “We believe competitive services are negatively impacting growth, particularly with younger audiences,” said Wehner, who also cited an increase in internet data prices in India as a reason for the slowdown. On the earnings call, Meta CFO David Wehner said this drop in user growth was due in part to increased competition from other apps. And in the long term, the company is making huge investments (to the tune of $10 billion in losses in the past year) in building out its AR/VR capabilities and other futuristic technologies that support the metaverse. To do that, Meta said it’s investing more in short-form video features like Reels, its TikTok clone. That means it’s more important than ever that Meta change its strategy in order to retain and attract new eyeballs.

Facebook’s user growth has declined before specifically in the US, but this is the first quarter in which its global daily user base has dropped. In its early days, Facebook was only available in the US, but has since expanded to almost every other country except for places like China, where the app is blocked. It’s long been known that user growth on the Facebook app was stagnating, in part because of its aging user base and the fact that it has run out of new countries to expand into. Wall Street immediately reacted: Meta shares were down 20 percent in extended trading after the news. And it places even more pressure on Meta’s big bet on the metaverse - a VR/AR-enabled alternative universe that CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees as the future of the internet - to actually work out. The statistic shows how Meta has struggled to stay relevant to younger users, many of whom are drawn to competing apps like TikTok. That might not seem like a major drop relative to its under 1.93 billion total daily active users, but it represents a low point for a metrics-driven company whose user base long grew at a rapid pace across its different apps. Facebook’s total number of users has declined - a first for the social media platform that has experienced seemingly never-ending growth since it debuted 17 years ago.įacebook lost about half a million global daily users in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to the previous quarter, according to the quarterly earnings report of Meta, its parent company.

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