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

Episode 880 of the The Big Story podcast, hosted by The Quint, titled "With a Decline in Daily Users, Is Facebook Having Its 'MySpace' Moment?" was published on February 4, 2022 and runs 15 minutes.

February 4, 2022 ·15m · The Big Story

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Summary

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 Listen to The Big Story podcast on: Apple: https://apple.co/2AYdLIl Saavn: http://bit.ly/2oix78C Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/2ntMV7S Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2IyLAUQ Deezer: http://bit.ly/2Vrf5Ng Castbox: http://bit.ly/2VqZ9ur Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices