Facebook user growth never seem to slow down since its founding, but in Feb. 2, 2022 , Facebook Lost daily users of more than 1million in north America, as it was quarterly reported. And for the first time in 17 years, Facebook reported lower than expected growth in advertising business, dropping down its stock value to 20 percent.
This huge drop in Facebook stock, stripped about $200 billion out of company market valuation. However, this was not first bad news Meta gets in days, after giving up its backing of diem cryptocurrency . Too look a bit further back, Facebook strategy to help its Libra cryptocurrency against all the legislation nagging was to rebrand it to Diem cryptocurrency, and it by doing the same by rebranding Facebook to Meta, it looks like they did it for similar reasons. Those rebranding measures proven to be not enough to ease investor’s worries about company’s main business in social media.
Meta is betting company future on metaverse
The statistics of Facebook user drop ,is demonstrating how the internet giant is struggling for relevance amongst younger user slice, young folks these days attracted to platforms such as TikTok , which put more pressure on Meat’s bet on Metaverse , and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision that the future of the internet will be Metaverse and VR. The company reported a $40 billion dollars profits last year, mostly from ad business, but in the other hand, it burns cash in “Reality Labs”, which is the division behind Quest VR and upcoming AR glasses and other Metaverse-related initiatives.
one of Facebook-acquired founder of TBH social networking app, Nikita bier made a tweet depicting a dark vision for the situation.
Facebook’s hands are tied
— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) February 2, 2022
1—High ARPU coastal users have churned; TikTok is eating their lunch
2—They can’t acquire because of antitrust scrutiny
3—They can’t build because founders don’t want to be there
4—IDFA killed their ability to target ads
5—The metaverse is 10yrs out
RIP
It’s clear now that Meta and Facebook, are facing a real challenge in terms of social space domination, control over this sector of internet is no more taken for granted as it was years ago.