Meta is in the doldrums: its revenues fall for the first time in its history as a public company

Since Meta, formerly called Facebook, went public in 2012, its revenue has grown every year, including in 2018, when the company was embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and in 2021, when Frances Haugen exposed a series of questionable practices.

Now, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s optimism in the metaverse and the other projects he has in mind, Meta faces a complex panorama: the first drop in income in its history as a public companywhich comes accompanied by a 36% decrease in profits.

Meta loses money and its shares fall

Meta presented this Wednesday its financial results for the second quarter of 2022. According to BloombergIn a report to investors, the social media giant announced a 1% drop in quarterly revenue. They were located in $28.8 billiondown from $29.1 billion in the same period of 2021.

Revenue also fell short of projections by Wall Street analysts, who estimated the figure to be as high as $28.9 billion. In addition, the blow came on the profit side. These were 6,700 million dollars between April and June, 36% less than that registered a year ago.

The decline was also seen in the number of monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook, the Menlo Park conglomerate’s flagship social network. MAUs went from 2,936 million in the first quarter to 2,934 million in the second quarter, but registered an increase of 1% year-on-year. In any case, given this set of factors, the company’s shares fell around 4.6% after hours.

It should be noted that almost all of Meta’s income come from your advertising platforma very important part of its business that seems to be affected by several factors, among them, the new privacy rules of the App Store, which limit the tracking of users by applications, among which are Facebook and Instagram .

Likewise, the firm led by Mark Zuckerberg is in the midst of important internal and external changes. While he reconfigures part of his work team and becomes more demanding than ever, he bets heavily on the metaverse (spending a fortune on development and research) and tries to confront the Chinese giant ByteDance by “tiktokizing” Instagram and Facebook.

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