In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one or more of Facebook’s Family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day.”
This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.
WhatsApp will not die because it is not intrusive or a live billboard ad in people’s faces. It is a very simple communication app that restricts itself to what it needs to do, and people need to communicate. Instagram on the other hand probably will start plateauing as people start to become aware of its advertisement/capitalism encouraging and mental health problem inducing characteristics, and Facebook is just a wasteland outside of Marketplace.