And despite about a decade of similar whining on HN about deleting Facebook they are still the most popular social network around.
I personally wouldn't gamble the farm on corporation ad spending's adherence to social justice if those eyeballs are all in one place... at least long term.
At least FB has to compete with messaging apps and Instagram/TikTok. Twitter doesn't have a good #2.
It's probably a mistake to take the emotional outrage news cycles over the next month (or 3) as much more than the exact thing people will keep going back to Twitter for... ironically this outrage at Musk is the exactly what drives people to use Twitter.
What I've found is Facebook is not popular with young people: the audience many advertisers are the most interested in. The stock market is certainly not happy with their latest results. So sure, I can easily find a source that says Facebook is still the most popular platform. The details matter. Is it growth in Asia that's keeping their numbers up while US users shrink? Are they failing to attract young people? Have they lost users among the HN demographics? These details matter if you want the actual story.
> One area where Meta showed promise was in adding to Facebook’s massive user base
> Facebook has 2.93 billion monthly active users. 1.98 billion daily active users. That was up from 1.97 billion three months ago.
> Facebook has 264 million monthly active users in the United States and Canada alone. The majority of Facebook’s users belong to the 25 to 34 age group.
> Twitter has 206 million daily active users.
> TikTok has 1 billion monthly active users (MAU’s).
Facebook is going through a massive pivot and spending a wild amount of $$ on the Metaverse. All tech stocks are down. So I wouldn't put too much weight on stock price.
The other major thing is how Apple changed ad tracking works which reduce ad prices by 20% on average. That's a major decline in revenue for any company ("Advertising represented 98.2% of the company’s total revenue"). But YoY revenue only declined by 4%.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-facebook-q3-earnings-repor...
Yes user-wise they do seem to be doing fine, but I'd like to know where the growth is happening. That's important.
The 2nd source has some interesting demographics, but unfortunately doesn't include growth which would be the most interesting to me.
Very interesting that their largest user base by far is now in India, which I hinted at before. I suspect much of their growth from their latest earnings report is from that region of the world. Which also helps explain why ad revenue is down. Note also that ad reach in India is a very low 30% compared to the UK at 60% or Mexico over 80%. They didn't give numbers for the US. But if a lot of the growth is in India with such a low ad reach, that doesn't bode well for ad revenue.
Facebook also seems to be failing at attracting the young demographic from the west that advertisers love. As their core user base ages it will be interesting to see if they can maintain the interest of advertisers. I think Instagram is going to prop them up for a while. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if Facebook starts to become less important to advertisers, who will quickly move to wherever their target audience spends the most time.
Either way, just because FB is doing fine user wise doesn't mean that folks on HN who threatened to quit FB didn't actually go ahead and do that. If every HN user quit FB in one day, I don't think it would even show up on any chart.
Of course it doesn't? Who cares. I deleted my account too but that doesn't mean much.
I'm highly skeptical this outrage cycle will go on for long enough to seriously impact their userbase. Absent a proper competitor to Twitter. I've been part of enough internet boycotts of them to be cynical about their odds.
Also I'm not sure why you're having trouble finding Facebook data... just google it if you care so much about dismissing their obvious dominance. And WSJ paywall is easily bypassable.
Yes paywalls are easy to bypass. It's also a reasonable choice to respect them.
> I'm not having trouble finding Facebook data. Did you get that idea from me asking you to back up your own claims?
You've asked me repeatedly about geographic and demographic data that Facebook (and plenty of 3rd party data mining sites) post publicly. If you actually care just compare it to other sites and make your own judgement calls.
If Facebook was really dying in the west then we'd be hearing about it. You seem to be using anecdotal data, in my life everyone I know hates Facebook but at least 75% of them use it... especially 90% of the non-technical ones who tend to be the best ad targets. Maybe you're not talking to enough regular people?
I didn't claim Facebook is dying in the West. That's you putting words in my mouth.