It could be said that Facebook is the mother of social networks , as it is the platform with the largest number of users around the world. However, his numbers in 2021 were not good and it seems that those of 2022 are going the same way.
Meta presented its financial results for the second quarter of 2022 and the accounts are not very encouraging. Facebook is in decline , with declining revenue and stagnant growth. The worst of the case? It seems that there is a culprit outside the house, TikTok, although Meta does not want to admit it.
Meta Inc. (Facebook) revenue and growth are stagnant
Meta released its Q2 2022 financial report recently and the results are not very positive. On the one hand, the company’s revenue fell compared to Q2 2021 , going from 29,077 million dollars to 28,822 million dollars. Meanwhile, the costs and expenses of Meta increased from 16,710 million dollars (for Q2 of 2021) to 20,464 million dollars (Q2 of 2022).
Only with these figures it can be seen that the company is not going through a good time , since they had to invest more money to enter a lower amount. However, it is not the only striking thing that the company’s balance sheet leaves, as there are also some gems among its user statistics:
- Among all Meta apps, the average number of daily active users was 2.88 billion as of June 2022. An increase of just 4% from June 2021.
- Taking only Facebook, the average number of daily active users was 1.97 billion, 3% more than in June 2021 .
These two statistics show that the growth of Meta platforms has stagnated , especially in the case of Facebook.
About these results, Mark Zuckerberg assured that they are due to the global recession of the economy, which is negatively affecting digital advertising. In case you did not know, Meta is a company dependent on ads, as they are their main source of income, especially on Facebook and Instagram. With all this, the CEO of Meta was quite positive with the results, noting that they were better than expected.
Do you think the reason for the stagnation is the economy? Maybe not, because TikTok’s financial results say otherwise.
TikTok had a great semester and is still unstoppable
Another company that presented its financial results for Q2 2022 was TikTok , and the numbers are the complete opposite of Meta. Compared to the second quarter of last year, ByteDance earned an extra $4.6 billion in Q2 2022 and expect to hit $12 billion in profit by the end of the year. ByteDance’s revenue in 2021 was $58 billion, so they expect to (at least) go as high as $70 billion. Most of this money comes from advertising, so Meta’s argument doesn’t seem to hold up very well.
And yes, ByteDance is a much smaller company than Meta, but its main platform, TikTok, is growing at breakneck speed. Some tests? These:
- In just 3 years, TikTok has become bigger than Twitter and Snapchat combined .
- TikTok is the most addictive social network , with an average usage of 28.7 hours per month for Q1 2022.
- TikTok already has more than 1 billion monthly active users . This is a third of the number of Facebook and half of Instagram, but with much less time in the global market.
These numbers hint at the success of TikTok and lead many to assume that it is the cause of the decline of Facebook and Instagram . There is no study that indicates that this correlation is the real cause, but it seems that the success of one is the failure of the other.
How is TikTok achieving this feat? Much of the success is due to its recommendation algorithm. This is responsible for suggesting content of interest to users, making them stay glued to the app for longer. Besides, short TikTok videos allow you to see more things in less time .
