Specifically, the number of daily users of Facebook reached 1.929 billion, down slightly from 1.93 billion users in the previous quarter (Q3 of 2021). In the 18 years of establishment and development, Facebook has always grown the number of daily users at a stable rate and has never recorded a quarterly decline.
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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta |
Sharing about the financial results of the fourth quarter of 2021, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company’s sales were affected as users, especially young people, left Facebook to come to Facebook. with rival platforms like TikTok. From the perspective of independent experts, the fact that young users do not choose Facebook has shown that this social networking platform is gradually lacking in relevance for young people.
After the news of the aforementioned decrease, combined with factors such as fierce competition from rival platforms (YouTube, TikTok), customers cut advertising spending and Apple changed its privacy policy. On Wednesday, Meta’s stock fell 20%. As a result, Meta has “failed” about 200 billion USD. Meta CFO Dave Wehner said the changes will negatively affect advertising on Facebook and Instagram, which could “up to $10 billion” this year.
Meta’s financial reports show that total revenue, largely from advertising, increased to $33.67 billion in the last period, slightly higher than previous projections. However, the revenue forecast for the next period is only in the range of $27-29 billion, much lower than analysts’ expectations.
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While Meta has invested exclusively in video to compete with TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, in reality the return is much lower than that of Facebook and Instagram feeds.
Expectations in metaverse, investors are skeptical
Zuckerberg acknowledged the rapid and sustainable growth of TikTok and said that competing directly with the platform is not the right direction. Instead, the CEO is determined that investing in video and virtual reality will pay off, as the company has previously bet on mobile ads and on Instagram’s stories feature.
However, investors have absolutely reason to worry about Meta for the time being. Meta changed its name because it wanted to focus on the metaverse virtual universe. However, in reality, Meta has not yet built its own metaverse and still has to continue to “make losses” for Reality Labs. In the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, Reality Labs lost $3.3 billion. Reality Labs is tasked with building Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse.
