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.
Once upon a time, after growth companies would shift from a growth stock to a stable stock. Instead of telling wall street “you can make money here” it would mean “you can keep your money relatively safe here”. We apparently don’t do that anymore. Seems like it would have been perfect for them.
That would work if they had a stable business model and produced something everybody needed or wanted, like diapers or alcohol. Their entire business model requires they keep users engaged and user count growing.
People will leave Meta the more Meta tries to make more off of a stagnant userbase, which will death spiral.
