Facebook: The Leading Social Platform of Our Times

• More than 77% of Internet users, about 3.59 billion people, are active on at least one Meta platform.
• Facebook’s annual revenue grew by 2,203% over ten years. Last year, Facebook earned $117 billion, which constituted a 36% increase from 2020. By comparison, in 2012, Facebook made $5.08 billion.
• Facebook’s net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2022, was $37.338 billion.
• Its net income for the quarter ending March 31, 2022, was $7.465 billion. This ranks Facebook as the largest social media platform.
• Over 1 billion stories are posted daily across Meta platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
• Over 79% of monthly Facebook users are active every day.
• Over 72% of Facebook users also use other social media channels. About 74.7% of Facebook’s fans enjoy YouTube, while 72.7% call via WhatsApp. And 78.1% of Facebook’s admirers flip through pictures on Instagram. TikTok attracts 47.8% of Facebook users, while 48.8% exchange opinions on Twitter. In addition, 36.1% of Facebook’s audience frequents Pinterest.
• Facebook is the most popular in India. Statistics show that 329 million people are socializing on Facebook in this country. Americans are in love with Facebook slightly less, with 179 million users exchanging opinions on the platform.
• An equal share of Democrats and Republicans – 76% vs. 76% – use Facebook in the USA.
• People spend an average of 19.6 hours a month on Facebook. Only lovers of YouTube give more attention to their favorite platform, watching videos for 23.7 hours a month. By comparison, people spend only 11.2 hours monthly on Instagram.
• People spend an average of 33 minutes a day on Facebook.
• Most people – 98.5% – use Facebook on their mobile devices. Over 81.8% of these people never access this social media channel via stationary computers.
• Facebook Groups are used by 1.8 billion people every month.
• Facebook Messenger is adding users at a sinister rate of 666,666 per day.

• The average organic reach of a Facebook Page post is 5.2%.
• Facebook removed 4,596,765 pieces of content in 2021 due to copyright, trademark, or counterfeit reports.
• Facebook’s potential advertising reach is 2.11 billion people. This is 72.5% of their total 2.936 billion monthly active users.
• Facebook ads reach 34.1% of the global population over the age of 13, which amounts to 2.11 billion people.
• Facebook ads reach 63.7% of all Americans over the age of 13.  
• Facebook Marketplace ads reach 562 million people.
• Facebook outperforms TikTok for short videos with 60.8% user share.
• Facebook is second to YouTube in live video, with 42.6% of user shares.
• Facebook Reels are available in 150 countries.

Sources: Facebook, Statista

• Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004 when he was 19. The idea behind Facebook was to help students match names with their classmates’ photos.
• Zuckerberg took Facebook public in 2012 and now owns about 12% of the company’s stock.
• In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife promised to give away 99% of their Facebook stake over their lifetimes.
• Zuckerberg’s net worth currently is $52.8 billion, which ranks him fifteenth on Forbes’s Billionaires List.  
• Zuckerberg and his wife are spending $3 billion to end or cure all diseases by 2100.
• In 2019, Zuckerberg bought $59 million worth of waterfront property on Lake Tahoe in California.
• In 2020, Zuckerberg said he would donate $300 million to protect American elections, with $250 million going to the Center for Tech and Civic Life and 50 million going to the Center for Election Innovation & Research. 

Source: Forbes

According to the company’s latest financial report, its quarterly revenues this year were $7.465 billion in Q1. In the second quarter of 2022, Meta’s net income amounted to $6.687 billion, which means that it shed 34% compared to the second quarter of 2021. Last year, Facebook earned $117.93 billion and thus celebrated an increase in revenue compared to $84.17 billion made in 2020. Over the years, Facebook’s earnings have consistently grown, which is reflected in the table below:

Sources: Statista, Meta

Facebook’s ad revenue makes up the lion’s share of its total revenue. In 2021, a staggering 97.5% of the $117.93 billion Facebook earned came from advertising. In the final quarter of the last year, the company generated nearly $33 billion in ad revenue, which was 20.1% up from the previous year. In the first quarter of 2021, Facebook earned $27 billion from ads.

The most recent data shows that Facebook has made $114.274 billion in advertising so far this year. This constitutes 97.2% of its total revenue in 2022. In the first quarter of 2022, the company made $27 billion in ad revenue. In the second quarter of 2022, advertising revenue showed the first ever year-over-year decline and thus marked the end of the company’s decade-long streak of ad revenue growth.  The Q2 ad revenue dropped 1% to $28.82 billion, while investors expected Facebook to earn $28.94 billion.

Meta experienced a broader financial squeeze in the fourth quarter of 2022 and a slowdown in ad spending. Ad impressions delivered across its various apps jumped by 23% compared to the previous year. The average price per ad dipped by 22% year-over-year. For 2022, impressions soared by 18% compared to 2021, while the average price per ad dropped by 16% year-over-year.

Facebook’s advertising revenue reached $31.254 billion in Q4 2022, unequally divided between different regions. The US brought Meta $15.005 billion in the fourth quarter, whereas Europe and the Asia-Pacific region earned it $6.904 billion and $5.968 billion, respectively. In the rest of the world, Facebook’s ad revenue amounted to $3.377 billion.

Sources: Meta

Meta reported its 2024 third-quarter earnings on Wednesday, October 30, with EPS of $6.03, $0.82 better than the analyst estimate of $5.21. Revenue for the quarter came in at $40.59B versus the consensus estimate of $40.18B.

“Not only did Meta exceed expectations for both earnings per share and revenue, but it did so by a wide margin, as the tech giant delivered its most profitable quarter on record,” said Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com. “Meta’s solid quarter adds further evidence to the view that digital advertisers are choosing to spend their budget on the so-called market leaders, such as Facebook and Instagram, at the expense of the smaller social media networks, like Snap.

“Meta is firing on all cylinders and AI is clearly driving growth. The company’s efforts to monetize Reels and its push into the Metaverse appear to be paying off,” he continued. “With that being said, investors appear to be disappointed over the company’s forward guidance and rising costs needed to develop AI features.”

In the second quarter of 2022, Facebook reported about 2.93 billion monthly active users, thus becoming the most popular and most visited online social network in the world. Facebook surpassed two billion active users in the second quarter of 2017. It took the company about 13 years to reach this milestone, while Google’s YouTube hit this mark 14 years after its inception. Instagram celebrated two billion active users just after it had its eleventh birthday.

In January 2022, Facebook was enjoying the widest popularity in India. Almost 330 million users in India reach one another on this social media network. With 179 million Facebook users, the United States ranks second, after which come Indonesia and Brazil. In these countries, Facebook’s popularity is also immense.

In the last quarter of 2022, Facebook’s monthly active user count rose to 2.963 billion, registering only a slight growth compared to the third quarter of 2022. It is also worrying that, compared to the third quarter, new users did not join Facebook in the North America, Europe, or Asia-Pacific region. More people flocked to the social platform only in the rest of the world: 979 million monthly users compared to 971 million people using Facebook in Q3 2022. However, the fourth-quarter figures registered an increase of 4% over the year. Facebook’s average revenue per user totaled $10.86.

Observe in the table below how Facebook’s worldwide acceptance has grown over the years:

Source: Statista

Meta presently owns four of the most popular social media platforms in the world: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram. At the end of 2021, there were around 3.5 billion users of these products worldwide. Among these social media channels, Facebook is the most widely used. People in India are enamored with Facebook the most. Apart from India, there are other countries where the number of Facebook users exceeds 100 million: the United States of America, Indonesia, and Brazil, with 179.65 million, 129.85 million, and 116 million Facebook fans, respectively. The table below presents the size of the Facebook audience in different countries in descending order:   

Source: Statista

Launched in 2011, Facebook Messenger is now the third most downloaded application in the world, outshined only by WhatsApp and Weixin/WeChat. Based on its global advertising audience reach numbers, over 2.9 billion people worldwide use the Facebook Messenger app monthly. The table below measures the popularity of instant messaging applications worldwide:

Source: Statista  

The popularity of Messenger is also measured by people’s activities. Over 260 million new conversations take place on the Facebook Messenger app daily. More than 20 billion messages between users are exchanged monthly on this application. Equally staggering is the number of photos people monthly share on Messenger: over 17 billion photos are sent by Messenger’s users to one another. By comparison, the number of pictures uploaded daily on Instagram is estimated at 95 million, meaning there are only 2.85 billion new photos shared on Instagram per month.

Like Facebook, Messenger has gained wide popularity in many countries. The latest statistic says that over 64% of people who use Facebook also use the Messenger platform. Just as they are the world’s top Facebook clientele, Indians use Messenger much more often than others. The number of Facebook messenger users is also high in the USA, rising consistently over the past several years. In 2021, there were 135.9 million Facebook Messenger users in the US, up from 133 million in 2020. In 2022, this number has so far increased to 138.1 million. The table below shows how many people communicate via Messenger in different countries. The figures presented here are based on the advertising audience reach numbers published in Facebook Messenger’s self-service tools in July 2022:

Meta delighted consumers with some technological innovations in 2022. It launched Microsoft games and made its Xbox Cloud Gaming service accessible on Meta’s Oculus Quest 2. Customers thus could attach an Xbox controller and use it to connect to the VR world to play their cloud gaming titles on the large, virtual screens in the comfort of their own homes. The company announced the development of Meta Horizon Worlds in the web’s metaverse section. The idea is to enable customers to connect with people hanging out in VR via phones and laptops or view YouTube videos on Meta Horizon Home.

Meta also revealed its new generation of Meta Avatars for the metaverse, planned to be more expressive and detailed, together with full-body avatars in VR, which will begin in Meta Horizon Worlds. The company intends to introduce avatars to video chat, Messenger and WhatsApp, allowing people to express themselves without turning their cameras on.

Some endeavors were abandoned in 2022, however. Meta closed such experiments as Portal home speaker device, publisher funding agreements, audio social tools, and a smartwatch project. It also delayed the launch of the AR glasses product, now scheduled for release in 2024. Yet, despite these setbacks, the company has a 2023 agenda to improve its AI discovery tools to enhance engagement with its app, develop better monetizing of messaging, and rebuild its ad tools to minimize the reliance on user data.

Facebook has long become part of people’s lives and their daily routines. It is one of the largest sources of news and entertainment. Nearly a third of US adults access Facebook to get informed about the latest developments in the world. Facebook is also a convenient place to wish people happy holidays or check whether our friends and relatives are safe in times of crisis. Many businesses have been launched there and prospered. Organic Facebook content is a large part of the business strategy for the existing audience because Facebook’s potential advertising reach is 2.11 billion people, a number that can move any business forward and bring it unprecedented growth. Above all, Facebook has proved that we live in a small world indeed.   

As Facebook (Meta) is nearly ubiquitous, its strength and influence are expected to grow in the upcoming years. Based on machine learning predictions, Coinpriceforecast.com foresees that its stock price will consistently increase over the next five years. Although Meta shares have recently tumbled 14%, sliding almost to their pandemic low, trading at $146.29 at the time of writing, there is a strong likelihood that the company will bounce back. Coinpriceforecast.com predicts that META will cost $200 per share by next year. The price of its shares is expected to soar to $300 in 2024, hit the $400 level in 2026, and jump to $500 in 2028. Whether these forecasts come to fruition or not, Facebook will probably remain the leading social platform where people will continue congregating to exchange opinions, share news, fight for truth, show off, check on others, and gossip.