The California group posted net income of $ 7.47 billion in the first quarter of this year, down 21 percent from last year, while its revenue rose 7 percent to close to $ 28 billion.
But the most striking of his results is that he has shown that he is never missing again.
Last February, Meta admitted that for the first time, it lost nearly a million active daily users.
At the end of March, Facebook’s daily active users reached 1.96 billion, while approximately 3.64 billion people worldwide use at least one of the group’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger , and WhatsApp) per month, representing little growth.
However, “Facebook user growth is stopping,” says eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.
Considering that the “growth engine task (of the group) is now on Instagram,” he pointed out that the number of users of the group’s virtual reality platform “Horizon Worlds” is limited to only hundreds of thousands at the stage. this, ”despite exaggerated projects Developing the“ Metaverse ”world from the media frenzy.
The group, led by Mark Zuckerberg, changed its name in October 2021 to reflect the change in its approach. The social media giant aims to focus on the “Metaverse”, which Silicon Valley describes as the future of the Internet, which is a parallel world that users enter using virtual or augmented reality technology to interact, work. or hobbies.
However, Meta, which ranks second in the world in terms of advertising volume on its networks, will face many bad conditions in the near future.
Policies introduced by Apple last year to prevent apps from collecting user data for advertising purposes without permission would be offensive under it.
Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Einberg said the issue “combines with the rise of Tik Tok and the concerns of brands (advertisers) about problematic social media posts and changes in their behavior. user ”as factors that“ may interfere with meta-advertisement. ”
He said that “advertisers, however, continue to use Facebook and Instagram to target their large audiences.”
The popular competitor of the Tik Tok app continues to draw a percentage of users from other well-known platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, prompting the two networks to mimic the successful Tik Tok formula by allowing to users to post short, entertaining videos from YouTube Shorts. ‘and’ Rails’ from ‘Instagram’.
While Meta president Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a conference call to analysts that the introduction of the short video format has “not yet generated huge revenue,” he confirmed that the group is optimistic about it.
Meta will suffer in 2022, as will its neighbor Google, from a comparison to 2021, which saw a boom in internet usage due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Both companies also had many employees, as Meta currently employs more than 77,800 people, up 28 percent each year.
And it won’t stop there, as Zuckerberg has invited engineers who want to build “Metaverse” and “work on amazing AI projects” to join his group.
In addition to Apple’s changes, social networks will have to adapt to new laws in Europe.
Consistent with several disputes over European data law that have not been resolved since 2018, the European Union recently passed a “historic” law, the Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to remove illegal content and cooperate with authorities. .
First of all, the American group is suffering from the effects of inflation, which is driving advertisers to skimp on their budgets, as the war in Ukraine led to a ban on Facebook and Instagram in Russia, and the two networks are no longer publishes Russian. ads around the world. .
As a result, Meta expects revenue to be “in the range of $ 28 billion to $ 30 billion in the second quarter of 2022,” i.e., unchanged from revenue for the same period last year ($ 29 billion).
Source: Al Akhbar
