Facebook has recorded its lowest daily active users (DAUs) in the history of the social media giant’s 18-year existence.
The battle for social media dominance
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has revealed DAUs plummeted to 1,929 billion during the final months of 2021 compared to 1,930 billion in the previous quarter. It attributed the ever-expanding popularity of a number of rival social media platforms, namely TikTok and YouTube, and advertisers cutting spending for its waning revenue growth.
It comes as Meta’s shares plunged by more than 20% in after-hours trading in New York City and wiped around $200 billion (£147 billion) off the company’s stock market value. Meta wasn’t the only social media platform to suffer from a sharp decline in shares, however, with Twitter, Snap, and Pinterest also recording losses in extended trading.
Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has previously blamed the company’s suffering sales growth on the vast migration of young Facebook users to rival social media platforms.
A change of direction
In addition to strong competition, Meta has also been hit by a number of recent privacy changes on Apple’s operating system.
It has made it difficult for brands to track and monitor their advertising efforts across social media and is predicted to cost global companies upwards of $10 billion (£7 billion) this year alone.
Zuckerberg, however, remains confident that his investments in virtual reality and the metaverse will be successful in reversing any long-lasting damage by following in the footsteps of his previous ventures into mobile advertising and Instagram Stories: “The teams are executing quite well, and the product is growing very quickly,” he said. “The thing that is somewhat unique here is that TikTok is so big a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate.”
