Facebook’s growth continues to slow down | Social Media

The era of Facebook’s nonstop growth has long since come to an end. Although the company is far from the point at which it might start to shrink, its growth in the US and Canada, as well as Europe, has stopped entirely and appears to occasionally decline.

In its 2018 third quarter earnings report out today, the social network confirmed that the number of daily active users in US and Canada has remained flat at 185 million, while the number of European users has slipped from 279 million to 278 million. The latter may be a direct result of recent European privacy regulations, namely GDPR, which initially caused Facebook to lose 1 million monthly active users after it went into effect in May.

Overall, the company continues to grow thanks to international expansion, adding 9 percent year over year to its daily active user base for a total of 1.47 billion people. The total number of month active users grew 10 percent from this time a year ago, to 2.27 billion people.

But despite that, and the fact that the company continues to grow its digital advertising business at an astonishing rate, the rate at which Facebook is growing continues to decline quarter to quarter and year over year. And it’s no longer growing in the markets in which it makes the most revenue per user (North America and Europe). So the fear of more user falloff and a lack of new user retention — and the inevitable ad revenue decline that would instigate — has some critics and analysts worried about its future.

Facebook says it grew ad revenues 33 percent year over to year, to $13.73 billion, coming in just under Wall Street analysts’ estimates. Profit was $1.76 a share, well over analyst expectations. Both monthly and daily active user growth figures came in under Wall Street estimates. Still, the company has done a good enough job warning its investors and the press of this eventual turn of events, leading to tempered Wall Street expectations this quarter after it suffered the biggest ever decline in the history of the American stock market last quarter. So Facebook’s share price has understandably remained steady in after-hours trading as a result.

But while Facebook’s short-term financial performance continues to keep it in the upper echelon of Silicon Valley, the company’s long-term future continues to look less rosy. The company has sustained a number of high-profile data privacy and security scandals, starting most prominently in March with the Cambridge Analytica debacle and most recently involving a massive security flaw that allowed a hacker to steal the login information of tens of millions of users. While these haven’t really affected Facebook’s bottom line, at least not yet, public perception of the company appears to be at an all-time low. Facebook will eventually feel the effects of users leaving the platform for greener pastures.

That’s why the company has increasingly looked to its ecosystem of apps and services, like Instagram and WhatsApp, as the key to its future. Facebook pointed out in its earnings release that “more than 2.6 billion people now use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger (our ‘Family’ of services) each month, and more than 2 billion people use at least one of our Family of services every day on average.”

It’s clear the core Facebook app will not remain on top forever, it seems, and the company is shifting resources toward ensuring its other platforms can fill the gap as teenagers grow up in a world where Facebook is profoundly uncool and more adult users grow disillusioned or uninterested and walk away.