Competition from the Chinese social network and the macroeconomic context made Meta’s income back for the first time in the second quarter.
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Meta, Wednesday, July 27, again known one of these moments that any technology business founder fears: for the first time since its creation, in 2004, the company created by Mark Zuckerberg saw its income back. Meta’s turnover, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s household, fell 1 % in the second quarter compared to the same period in 2021, to 28.8 billion dollars (28.4 billion euros) . Net profit dropped by 36 %, to $ 6.7 billion.
In the previous quarter, the world leader in social networks (2.88 billion daily users) had already announced the first drop in the number of Internet users connecting to Facebook every day. Meta faces a serious crisis that makes her ability to reconnect with two -digit growth. “We are optimistic in the long term,” tried to reassure Mark Zuckerberg, attributing the main problems to the macroeconomic context, “worse than three months ago”.
The war in Ukraine has, in fact, forced the company to stop its activities in Russia, the inflation and the fear of a recession weigh on advertising expenses and the power of the dollar lower the activity outside United States (without this effect changes, revenues would have believed 3 %, assured Meta). But the group is also faced with fundamental problems. The first is the competition of Tiktok, the Chinese social network which, at the end of 2021, passed the bar of the billion users, with a growth of 45 %, according to the specialist in social networks Hootsuite.
Very short videos
The main threat of Tiktok lies in its very short videos format, a few seconds, and its mechanics: to offer the user the content deemed the most entertaining, from accounts that it does not necessarily follow. Meta chose the copy strategy, launching its own format of short videos, “real”. To impose it, he started to make it appear more and more in the wire of users on Instagram, where he became the default video format.
On Facebook, an interface change should highlight this suggested content, while the photos and videos of friends and accounts followed will be accessible in a separate tab. Problem: these changes arouse the misunderstanding and protests of certain users. “Stop trying to be tiktok, I just want to see photos of my friends”, displayed a publication on Instagram , shared in particular by the star of the Kylie Jenner network (360 million subscribers) and his sister, Kim Kardashian (326 million), Monday, July 25.
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