Facebook reaches milestone, crosses 2 billion daily active users

There was a time when Facebook dominated social media and had little to no serious competition. However, over the years, competition from platforms like TikTok and others have hurt the Zuckerberg-led company. During the past quarter, the company saw its revenue fall by more than 30%. However, it’s not all gloom for the social network as its latest earnings call reveals. The Meta-owned company Facebook now has over 2 billion daily active users.
“Our community continues to grow and I’m pleased with the strong engagement across our apps. Facebook just reached the milestone of 2 billion daily active users,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.

Facebook and sister apps saw a noticeable growth in user activity
The earnings call report mentioned that the overall active users on Facebook as well as Meta’s family of apps – which includes Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp – saw a jump. While Facebook saw an average of 2 billion daily active users (4% growth year-over-year), the Meta app family saw an average footfall of 2.96 billion (5% growth year-over-year). On a monthly basis, Facebook received an average of 2.96 billion active users. Parallelly, Meta app family saw an average traction of 3.74 billion monthly active users.
Zuckerberg emphasised the roles of popular short videos Reels and Meta’s progress with its use of AI. He said, “The progress we’re making on our AI discovery engine and Reels are major drivers of this. Beyond this, our management theme for 2023 is the ‘Year of Efficiency’ and we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.”

Meta experienced a growth in users amid changing priorities
This growth in userbase comes at a time when Meta has carried out layoffs and restructuring in response to the global economic slowdown. In November 2022, the company had announced it was cutting around 11,000 jobs, owing to a change in priorities.
Back then, Zuckerberg had said, “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected … Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected … I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”