Facebook Hits Two Billion Daily Active Users

Meta, a multinational technology conglomerate that handles Facebook, reported on Wednesday that the platform has just hit its first two billion Daily Active Users (DAUs).

In its fourth quarter report, it's been revealed that there has been an increase of users by 4% year-over-year and that this two billion success has been marked on top of the additional 16 million users last quarter.

"Our community continues to grow and I'm pleased with the strong engagement across our apps." said Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta to Reduce Cost and Increase Efficiency

Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has come a long way in proving its worthiness in terms of revenue and expansion. Despite this growth, Meta remains its firm position of reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency by cutting layers of middle management in addition to the 11,000 employees they removed from the workforce last year. The hiring freeze will then continue to be enforced throughout the first quarter of 2023.

Zuckerberg also said that they are planning to cut projects that are no longer performing or may no longer be as crucial as before. The company's progress on AI discovery engine, and Reels are major drivers of this. As the company would like to call it, 2023 is the "Year of Efficiency" and now they are more focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.

Continues Loss In Meta's Revenue

Metaverse, as Zuckerberg has previously defined, is an 'embodied internet where you're in the experience, not just looking at it'. Compared to the 2D and screen-based internet we have right now, the metaverse will be a 3D virtual space, accessed by either a VR headset or AR (augmented reality) glasses.

In its investments, especially for the implementation of VR, AR, and other metaverse projects, Meta CFO Susan Li, said that the company is now expected to lose more money than their $14 billion loss in 2022. But given the potential and the significant long-term opportunities that the company sees in these creations, they still opt to continue the investments.

Meta also remains optimistic that the company is in the middle of a rapid phase change now. Although Reality Labs' losses have contributed to Meta's revenue slowdown in the past year, Zuckerberg said that it is fine to not treat everything like it's hyper-growth, "There are gonna be some areas that are going to be very rapidly growing, or that are very, kind of, future investments that we want to make."

Growth may really come with a lot of challenges and setbacks. While Facebook has reached another milestone, Meta is yet to fully celebrate until they see the success of the company's other projects and make up for the losses of its revenue over the past years.