In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one or more of Facebook’s Family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day.”
This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.
Which they could also report on. The fact they’re removing a standard metric they’ve relied on, rather than relegate it, shows they have fear this metric is going to be detrimental to publish. You can fairly safely assume it’s going to go down. It’s no longer sexy, tik tok is killing it, and most that would be on it, are, and are discovering it’s not greatly beneficial to them and spending less time on it. It is the start of the decline. How long and how fast is the thing we do not know.