With a Decline in Daily Users, Is Facebook Having Its 'MySpace' Moment?

Since its inception in 2004, Facebook's vision of growing its user base has been going steady, despite all the scandals, backlash, US Senate hearings, and regulatory pressure.

But on 3 February, Meta – what the company is now known as – reported a half a million decline globally in its daily user base, a first in the social media giant's 18-year history.

You may think that a half a million drop is negligible when compared to Meta's existing user base, but it nevertheless wreaked havoc in the stock market, with investors fleeing after taking a peek at Meta's quarterly earnings report.

The dip in users, combined with the earnings report, plunged Meta's stock by nearly 26 percent, instantly shaving $250 billion dollars off its market value and $29 billion off Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.

And if you can't compute this fall, imagine the fall of two IBMs, two General Electrics, or McDonald's! This was the single largest one-day dollar drop for a US company in history!

Meta listed out several reasons for the drop - from Apple's new privacy rules to the increase in competition from TikTok. But the fundamental questions that I will try to address in today's episode are: Is Facebook having its 'MySpace' moment? Has it reached its peak? What led to this fall?

To help me unpack this, I speak to Udbhav Tiwari, a policy advisor at Mozilla. Tune in!

Host and Producer: Himmat Shaligram

Editor: Shorbori Purkayastha, Nitish Rampal

Music: Big Bang Fuzz

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