Since its launch in 2005, Facebook is known to be one of the most growing sites in the history of the Internet. The famous platform, and only 5 years after its launch, was the fastest growing in the world, to begin its big steps that enabled it to reach what it is today.
All this success started to stall a while ago, especially when the rate of increase in the number of users decreased to almost 1%. It is understandable that the platform is used by more than 2 billion users, and it is difficult to achieve a significant growth rate, but the matter did not stop here, as the number of Facebook users decreased for the first time in history during the last quarter of 2021.
The number of users decreased during that period from 1.93 billion users to 1.929 billion users (one million less), most of whom were concentrated in North America, according to The Verge, to be the first time that this had happened.
The worst thing is that the platform was unable to achieve the advertising revenue it expected during the same period, which, in addition to the decrease in the number of users, led to the company losing $ 200 billion of its market value during the past few hours.
The matter is not as catastrophic as it seems, as the Meta company achieved $ 40 billion in net profits during the past year only, but some of its subsidiaries did not achieve any profits. Oculus, for example, has made more than $10 billion in losses because the company invests a lot of money in it and does not reap any return until this moment.
It is likely that the reason behind the decrease in the number of Facebook users is the increase in competition in the social networking market, which it seems that Instagram and TikTok are on their way to controlling it during the coming period, or at least their transformation into the most popular platforms, even if they are not the most users.
Scandals related to privacy that appear from time to time are also highly influential factors, especially since they are followed by campaigns to close user accounts in protest of the violation of their privacy.
The American company tried to reduce these effects by renaming the company from Facebook to Meta in order to avoid at least the rest of the services being affected by the bad reputation of Facebook, but Facebook itself has not been spared from its actions until this moment. Will it be the beginning of the end for Facebook or a small setback?