Source: Statista

If you sometimes feel like you’re online pretty much nonstop, we have good news for you: you’re not alone. According to a recent Pew Research survey, 4 in 10 American adults say they’re almost always online, up from just 24 percent claiming to be constantly online in 2015. It’s one of the negative side effects of the rise of smartphones: many people are finding it increasingly hard to “disconnect”.

According to Pew’s findings, young adults find it particularly hard to be “offline”, with 62 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds saying they’re constantly online. The main reason for this trend is the ubiquity of smartphones which 97 percent of those aged 18 to 49 saying they own one. At the other end of the age range, just 15 percent of those aged 65 and older said to be almost constantly online. In that age group, 76 percent of respondents owned a smartphone.

In recent years, smartphone addiction and digital well-being has become a growing point of discussion, with many experts asking smartphone makers and social media companies to make their products less addictive. And while the former have at least started to implement tools to manage or limit screen time, social media companies have very little incentive to follow suit, as their business model depends on high user engagement.

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, here we are, two days ahead of the platform’s 20th birthday and Facebook is still growing. According to Meta’s latest earnings release, the world’s largest social network ended 2023 with 3.07 billion monthly active users, up 3 percent – or more than a hundred million users – from a year ago.

Amazingly, to this day, Facebook has never seen a year-over-year drop in active users and once it happens, we won’t know, because the company announced that it won’t be reporting Facebook user numbers going forward. Instead, the company will focus on metrics that are more relevant to its advertising business, such as changes in ad impressions and the average price per ad at the regional level.

Speaking of Meta’s advertising business, the company blew past analyst expectations in the fourth quarter, reporting a new revenue record of $40.1 billion, 96 percent of which came from advertising. That’s up 25 percent from last year’s December quarter while the company’s profit more than tripled year-over-year to $14 billion. “2023 was our ‘year of efficiency’,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with investors. “I think that being a leaner company is helping us execute better and faster,” he said referring to the aggressive cost-cutting measures implemented in 2023, which included laying off thousand of employees.