• Facebook now has over 3 billion monthly active users, making it the most visited non-Alphabet platform in the world.
• The massive popularity of the site helped Meta accrue $32 billion in revenue in Q2 2023.
• Despite this, Meta’s Reality Labs arm continues to mount losses for the firm.

As some of the largest tech companies in the world publish their financial results for the second quarter of 2023, Meta, the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads has revealed unprecedented user metrics in its own results.

According to the results, Facebook – Meta’s original social network – now has 3.03 billion monthly active users as of June 2023. This can be understood as 37 percent of the global population uses Facebook at least once a month.

The platform’s popularity is only growing, with the latest milestone representing a year on year growth of around 3 percent. Facebook’s daily user metrics were also impressive, with Meta revealing that 2.06 million people use Facebook at least once a day on average.

Now Facebook’s enormous popularity is only eclipsed by the likes of Google, which remains the most-visited website on Earth.

Research firm DataReport says that as of July 2023, Facebook is the top social media platform in terms of how many individuals advertisers can reach. Beating out YouTube, whose potential ad reach sits around 2.5 billion users.

Behind YouTube are Meta’s other platforms, WhatsApp and Instagram with 2 billion and 1.08 billion monthly active users respectively.

Meta shared that ad impressions across its platforms increased by 34 percent year over year, but the average it charges for ad spots decreased 16 percent. So while more people are seeing ads on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, advertisers are paying slightly less to Meta to host the ads.

While this may seem counterintuitive, Meta could be using affordability to lure more advertisers to its platforms. This seems to be working, as the company raked in revenues of $32 billion, making a profit of $9.39 billion after expenses.

A large chunk of expenses went to Meta’s Metaverse and virtual reality wing, Reality Labs. This segment lost the company $3.7 billion in the quarter. About $1 billion more than in the second quarter of 2022.

This segment has yet to turn a profit for Meta since the company made a huge tilt towards virtual reality technology during its 2022 rebranding.

Yet, the second quarter of the year was an overall positive outcome for the California-based firm, echoed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “We had a good quarter,” he said.

“We continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap I’ve seen in a while with Llama 2, Threads, Reels, new AI products in the pipeline, and the launch of Quest 3 this fall,” he added.

[Image – Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash]