Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.
Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.
3.58 to 3.56 is not loss.
They’re losing rich country users faster that they’re picking up developing country users of lower ARPU.
Therefore expect revenue to decline, at the same time they’re spending buckets chasing AI as the next pivot.
They spent $billions on the last pivot and even renamed the company after it, but all their spending on the metaverse amounted to 💩
And yet they still have lots of money and users. I want them to disappear as much as the average Lemmy user, but let’s not delude ourselves.
It’s not going anywhere soon. AOL took decades to die.
But the decline has set in.
Fair, everything dies. AOL died because broadband came around. AOL was pretty awesome in its peak, even if it was tailored to the low end user.
I don’t think there will be another social network with “friends” again to kill Facebook. I long for the days of OG MySpace.
They had previously been growing around 40 million to 60 million active users a quarter.
With this first quarter of minus 20 million active users, it very well could indicate that the Facebook growth engine is over.
Ultimately we’ll need to see how the next few Qs work out.
The first time it ever declined.