When you talk about Facebook, it’s generally appropriate to use the word ‘billions’ in conversation. The company bought VR company Oculus for $2 billion. It passed 2 billion monthly users some time in 2017. At the time, it saw a little over 1.2 billion of those users turning up every day.

Well, now there’s a new milestone for Mark Zuckerberg and co. to celebrate. The company’s most recent earnings reports dropped a surprising statistic — Facebook has crossed the 2 billion daily users mark.

Facebook hungers

To be fair to the company, it has been creeping up on the total for some time now. Q4 2020 saw 1.845 billion users on the social network each day. Q3 2022 had that number sitting at 1.984 billion. In the last quarter of 2022, Facebook accrued the 16 million daily users it needed to finally push it over the top. But it’s not the first Meta-owned property to pass 2 billion daily users.

That honour belongs to everyone’s favourite messaging app, WhatsApp. In October 2022, the app crossed the massive milestone. The number of users sending messages each day is a good indication of why Zuckerberg is so keen to somehow monetise or advertise on the platform. That’s a whole lot of eyeballs. Instagram, Meta’s other attention-sucker, has some catching up to do. It only commands 2 billion monthly users at present.

Mark Zuckerberg, during the earnings call announcing these stats, also outlined a bit of Meta’s future. Apparently, 2023 is the company’s “Year of Efficiency”. That suggests money will be spent in more targeted ways. Generative AI (think ChatGPT and the various AI-powered image creation options) is also set to be a focus for the company.

“Generative AI is an extremely exciting new area with so many different applications. And one of my goals for Meta is to build on our research to become a leader in generative AI,” said Zuckerberg. In other words, Meta as a company will continue to do what everyone else is doing, just (hopefully) better.

Source: Meta via Engadget