Facebook Hits 2 Billion Monthly Active Users (Jun 27, 2017)
It’s a milestone I’ve been anticipating since Facebook’s last earnings call in May: Facebook has hit 2 billion monthly active users, up from 1.936 billion at the end of March, signifying slightly faster growth in Q2 this year than last year, and putting Facebook MAUs at around 27% of the world’s total population. In and of itself, the milestone is no more important than any other number Facebook might have reported – there’s no magic to two billion – but it’s indicative of Facebook’s massive reach, which continues to grow more quickly over time. As I said back in May, Facebook is the first company ever to have announced two billion regular users for any product, though Google search has to be close, and other Google products such as Android and YouTube have been officially pegged at 2 billion active devices and 1.5 billion monthly users respectively. What’s perhaps even more interesting is the way Facebook itself seems to be downplaying the milestone – Mark Zuckerberg’s post on the topic is very brief, while Facebook’s corporate post (linked below) quickly glosses over the number and goes back to the company’s recent focus on community and using its enormous influence explicitly for good. Partly, I think that reflects a new humility on the part of Zuckerberg about the mixed influence Facebook has had on the world, but I also wonder if it wants to avoid painting a target on its own back from an antitrust and broader regulatory perspective, especially in light of the EU action against Google this morning. Lastly, it’s worth talking briefly about where that growth is coming from, and where it will come from in future. Facebook’s first billion came roughly half from North America and Europe, and half from the rest of the world, while just 16% of its second billion came from those first two regions, and 84% came from Asia and the Rest of the World, with nearly half the total coming from Asia. That picture is only going to skew even more in that direction going forward, with Asia in particular and the Rest of World region to a lesser extent driving over 90% of growth. That means more Internet.org-type activities to grow the addressable market, but it also means that growth in users won’t bring nearly the revenue growth past user growth has, because ad spend and incomes are far lower in many of the markets where Facebook will grow going forward. Update: I’ve just published a deeper dive on Facebook’s first, second, and third billions on Beyond Devices here.
via Facebook
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