Facebook - statistics & facts

Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp are subsidiaries of Meta Platforms, and are now known as Meta’s Family of Apps (FoA). It has been suggested that Meta’s name change was merely a ploy to distract from recent negative press that the company faces, namely antitrust lawsuits, privacy issues, low tax payments, and the dissemination of hate speech. The rebranding is in some ways comparable to Google’s corporate restructuring and founding of parent and holding company Alphabet Inc. in 2015.

Facebook as a social media giant

Although Facebook has encountered much criticism, it nevertheless remains successful. Today, Facebook is still the most popular social network worldwide, followed by Google’s video sharing platform YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram, respectively. It is by far Meta’s most used social media platform. As of the fourth quarter of 2021, Facebook had a total of 2.91 billion monthly active users globally. India is the country with the largest Facebook audience size, with over 329 million Facebook users, followed by the United States and Indonesia. As of the beginning of 2022, almost a fifth of Facebook’s users were men between the ages of 25 and 34 years old, making them the platforms most common users.

Company revenue

In 2021, Meta generated 117.92 billion U.S. dollars in revenue, up by over 31 billion US dollars on the previous year. The company’s business model heavily relies on advertising and generated 114.93 billion U.S. dollars through ads in the last financial year. The company’s average revenue per user (ARPU) in 2021 was 40.96 U.S. dollars, up from 32.03 U.S. dollars in 2020. Meta’s Family of Apps accounted for the vast majority of the company’s financial success.
Despite Facebook’s popularity and success, it is still tarnished from negative press. A fair number of people still have unfavorable views of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and are skeptical of Meta’s recent branding move.

Social media content on Facebook

Facebook is a commonly used as source of news for many people around the world. As of January 2022, the publishers that gained the most interaction on Facebook were predominantly news outlets, with dailywire.com ranking in as the leading publisher, followed by bbc.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk and cnn.com. Whilst an easily accessible source of news and current events, the platform faces a plethora of potentially misleading and harmful content. For example, throughout 2021, Facebook took action on and removed approximately 6.5 billion fake accounts. Bullying and harassment related content has also been on the rise, especially since the beginning of 2021, with over 34 million pieces of such content being removed last year.

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