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.
It is more that they are not growing, and that means dying in their business model. By not reporting an accurate metric of user engagement, they are hiding the stagnation or loss. Background logins from apps are likely also hiding the real picture of user engagement. Without active user engagement they lose their revenue, data harvesting and advertising.
So there are signs that they are in a downturn, which will lead to irrelevance and failure.
Once upon a time, after growth companies would shift from a growth stock to a stable stock. Instead of telling wall street “you can make money here” it would mean “you can keep your money relatively safe here”. We apparently don’t do that anymore. Seems like it would have been perfect for them.
That would work if they had a stable business model and produced something everybody needed or wanted, like diapers or alcohol. Their entire business model requires they keep users engaged and user count growing.
People will leave Meta the more Meta tries to make more off of a stagnant userbase, which will death spiral.
For sure, they don’t know how to be a stable revenue, or how to retain users. So we get this clusterfck
“like diapers or alcohol” lol. That resonates to me as a parent
we used to call that ‘value investing’ and get rewarded with reliable dividends. useful during periods of high interest rates, which stunted growth.
I think you’re reading more into that than there is.
Do you still use Myspace?
No, and never did - but I don’t understand your point. Facebook started only a year after Myspace did.