Facebook at 20: All Grown Up With 3 Billion Users

We’ve been hearing variations of the same story for years: "Facebook is no longer cool", "people are leaving Facebook behind", "teenagers are over Facebook" and so on and so forth. And yet, here we are, two days ahead of the platform's 20th birthday and Facebook is still growing. According to Meta's latest earnings release, the world's largest social network ended 2023 with 3.07 billion monthly active users, up 3 percent - or more than a hundred million users - from a year ago.

Amazingly, to this day, Facebook has never seen a year-over-year drop in active users and once it happens, we won't know, because the company announced that it won't be reporting Facebook user numbers going forward. Instead, the company will focus on metrics that are more relevant to its advertising business, such as changes in ad impressions and the average price per ad at the regional level.

Speaking of Meta's advertising business, the company blew past analyst expectations in the fourth quarter, reporting a new revenue record of $40.1 billion, 96 percent of which came from advertising. That's up 25 percent from last year's December quarter while the company's profit more than tripled year-over-year to $14 billion. "2023 was our 'year of efficiency'," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with investors. "I think that being a leaner company is helping us execute better and faster," he said referring to the aggressive cost-cutting measures implemented in 2023, which included laying off thousand of employees.