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.
So a company that made 12 Billion in profit in one quarter is dying because it’s growth has slowed down/plateaued?
Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.
Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.
And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.
It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.
Oh it’s definitely dying.
We’re Watching Facebook Die
It’s not happening fast enough.
Facebook’s capital and access to oceans of customer data sure isn’t going to die, though. Maybe mutate
Looks like you didn’t see them get tucked out of billions in EU courts for profiting off their users data
Oh nice, if I’m understanding you
Yeah, my point is that there are fewer and fewer markets that let the profit off of people this way. Either they die or they find an ethical way to make money, that doesn’t violate peoples data rights.
That’s undeniably a good thing, but I’m still cynical that capital will ever find a truly “ethical” niche to exploit.
Of course that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to legally constrain it as much as possible, as I’ve just learned has been done in the EU, thank you!
All I need are good alternatives to:
- find or coordinate local events
- post used things for sale
and Facebook is totally irrelevant to me. The way people switched from Kijiji to Marketplace absolutely screwed me over for leaving Meta.
Those two are really the only good use cases today for facebook. Insane how Marketplace pretty much overnight almost killed local listing sites. Events I don’t see good alternatives, don’t have much hopes for that one, time will show
Absolutely, I’m in QC and we had a couple of way to sell things, lespac, kijiji, etc. but Marketplace is now 100% the king of it, it’s quite incredible especially in big city like Montréal. Others platforms to sell are quite dead.
The other thing I’m using FB for, is groups, that replaced good old web forums… On FB there’s group of everything, costco addicts, dollarama addicts, plants addicts, with ten of thousands of locals people.
Companies whose shares are trading above $100 will never die.
Articles like this are just clickbait. Fb provides a services and many ignorant people do use it everyday. They have fb services running in all the major smartphones even after you delete the app as general public don’t know how to remove the service.
So yeah, fb will never die
I recently deleted my Meta-account, and I hope they will be a thing of the past in the not too distant future. Zuck can get fucked.
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.
I feel like people just collectively forget how much Facebook owns now. WhatsApp, Instagram, (formerly) Oculus VR, etc
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.
