Source: Statista

We’ve been hearing variations of the same story for years: “Facebook is no longer cool”, “people are leaving Facebook behind”, “teenagers are over Facebook”, and so on and so forth. And yet, the world’s largest social network continued to grow, adding nearly 600 million monthly active users over the past three years alone. Until now that is. According to its latest earnings release, Facebook‘s monthly active users declined by two million in the second quarter of 2022, a first in the platform’s 18-year history. And while the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed the decline to “internet blocks related to the war in Ukraine”, it is in line with the broader trend as our chart shows.

In Q2 2022, Facebook had 2,934 million monthly active users, down from 2,936 million in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, the number of daily active users climbed from 1,960 million in Q1 2022 to 1,968 million in the three months ended June 2022. Looking at year-over-year growth, both monthly and daily active users follow a similar downward trend and are now in the low single digits.

So have we officially reached “Peak Facebook”? For now it’s too early to tell, but if the trend continues in the next quarter, it would be an ominous sign, suggesting that all the surveys pointing towards declining Facebook usage may have had a point after all.

Source: Statista

We’ve been hearing variations of the same story for years: “Facebook is no longer cool”, “people are leaving Facebook behind”, “teenagers are over Facebook”, and so on and so forth. And yet, the world’s largest social network continued to grow, adding nearly 600 million monthly active users over the past three years alone. Until now that is. According to its latest earnings release, Facebook‘s user growth plateaued in the last three months of 2021, a first in the platform’s 18-year history.

In Q4 2021, Facebook had 2,912 million monthly active users, practically unchanged from 2,910 millionin the previous quarter. The same trend was visible in the platform’s most engaged users, as the number of those logging in daily declined from 1,930 million in Q3 2021 to 1,929 million in the last three months of the year.

So have we officially reached “Peak Facebook”? For now it’s too early to tell, but if the trend continues in the next quarter, it would be an ominous sign, suggesting that all the surveys pointing towards declining Facebook usage may have had a point after all.

Source: Statista

17 years ago, on February 4, 2004, then-19-year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, along with some of his classmates, launched a little website called Thefacebook.

“Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges”, the original website greeted its visitors back then, explaining that it would enable them to “search for people at your school, find out who are in your classes [sic], look up your friends’ friends and see a visualization of your social network.”

Confined to the Harvard campus at first, the service quickly gained popularity and was subsequently rolled out to other colleges. By the end of 2004, Thefacebook had more than 1 million registered users and the newly-founded company behind it had not only moved to Silicon Valley but also secured a $500,000 investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. After changing its name to just “Facebook” in 2005, the social network was opened to the general public in the fall of 2006, marking the start of one of the most remarkable growth stories in corporate history.

Within three years, the social network added 350 million users. In the summer of 2012, it became the first online service of its kind to reach 1 billion monthly active users.

Despite being shrouded in controversy over its (mis)handling of user privacy and its questionable role in political manipulation in the United States and abroad, Facebook continues to grow. By the end of 2020, Facebook’s monthly active user base had grown to 2.8 billion users.