Number of daily Facebook users shrinks for the first time since inception

Facebook has fewer daily users worldwide than in the previous quarter for the first time since its inception. Parent company Meta says during the presentation of the quarterly figures that the growth in advertising income is also less high than expected.

Meta speaks in the financial report about 1.93 billion daily active users; a presentation of those same numbers states even more precisely that in the fourth quarter of 2021, Facebook had 1.929 billion daily active users worldwide. That is one million fewer than in the third quarter, when Facebook was still visited by 1.930 billion users per day. It is the first time since Facebook was founded in 2004 that the platform had fewer such “DAUs” in a quarter than in the previous quarter. The number of monthly active users did increase by one million users to 3.59 billion.

Meta only gives the number of users for Facebook. In addition, it mentions the number of active users on all its platforms together, which also includes Instagram and WhatsApp, but they are not specified separately. The number of daily active users on all those services is 2.82 billion, compared to 2.81 billion a quarter earlier. The growth is therefore considerably smaller than the growth in the past two years, when about 100 million new users were added each month.

The disappointing growth figures do not mean that the profit of the company is falling. Meta made a profit of $39 billion in all of 2021, compared to 29 billion in 2020. The vast majority of that came from advertising. The revenue from advertisements is lower than expected. Facebook attributes this, among other things, to the changes Apple made to iOS, making it easier for users to refuse tracking ads. Meta also spends a lot of money on Reality Labs, the part that works on metaverse applications, among other things. That cost $10 billion last year, with sales of $2.3 billion primarily due to sales of the Quest headset and virtual reality applications.