Yes, I assume its correct, though to be clear, I have absolutely no way to validate it.
This quote from an analyst is one reason why I believe the user numbers.
> "It's hard to get people to stop using something they love. People love using these products, and there's these massive attacks that news outlets continue to heap on them, but consumers like these platforms and advertisers follow eyeballs. Most of Facebook's advertisers have no other place to go with a return on investment this good. This is clear proof."
Following eyeballs and good ROI do not always go hand-in-hand.
In my dream world I'd love to see a more granular ARPU breakdown and how much of that came from growth in ad impressions/user vs. increased CPMs for advertisers as well as some sort of count of advertisers and their spend by tier of advertiser size. If I recall correctly, one of the fairly recent moves was cutting bad on FB feed ad frequency which resulted in increasing CPMs and in theory concentrating the advertiser base further to those big brands that can afford the higher CPMs.
Many advertisers are experiencing higher CPMs on FB properties as one might expect as they consolidate their hold on the market. As that continues, at a certain point ROI may not be that good, and they may see diminishing returns and look elsewhere. That's the normal cycle of saturation of ad sources. The question is how long FB can stretch that out and innovate.
>>We define a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger app (and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.
I suppose that DAU is the same, but of course daily.
Still, the chart looks too nice to me => personally, I always automatically mistrust any chart that looks that nice/regular.
Well, even if the volume is very high, the scandals had planetary coverage, therefore I would still expect to see some kind of impact? Or would it still be too little to show a variance in the trend?
Dumping here links of DAU/MAU charts of other apps (no specific selection - it's all what I was able to find):
The most stable one seems to be the one of WeChat? I personally understood that without it, when living in China, your life can get very hard as you're not even able to pay for some services or get loans etc... (therefore there is a lot a direct pressure to use it).
> the scandals had planetary coverage, therefore I would still expect to see some kind of impact
You mean you'd expect a meaningful drop. Why? I expected very little consequence. People know Facebook doesn't cost them a monthly fee to use, they realize it's a huge entity that runs advertising to pay the bills. Everyone using the Internet these days is familiar with advertising online. The bulk of the users are precisely the ones that aren't shocked by the privacy scandal. They get to use Facebook and don't have to pay cash for it, they know the deal even if only broadly. Despite the endless attempts by the media to portray all FB users as ignorant.
Target had a huge scandal of stolen customer information. They didn't lose a big part of their sales. Equifax isn't going out of business. Few consumers stopped using Windows over Microsoft's business tactics in the 1990s or after. Walmart used to particularly pay their employees terribly and were pretty vicious cutthroats with suppliers and competitors (still are), outside of a tiny group none of it stopped people from shopping there. Amazon is guilty of a lot of that same behavior over the last two decades.
There's a required threshold for how bad Facebook's behavior would have to be, to turn the average user off of their 'free' service. They haven't got near that level yet. For most people it's a useful social utility that connects them to everyone they know and they don't have to pay money for it. Users will put up with a lot accordingly.
> the scandals had planetary coverage, therefore I would still expect to see some kind of impact
That would assume that news is accurately reporting reality. News is a business as well, you create issues, pile on, and gather ad impressions. There's definitely built-in pressure to exaggerate as a result.
Some of the most egregious is attributing short-term market trends with specific political issues (as opposed to noise or changes market fundamentals).
The darker side is when how news companies can shape public perception. In this case, the business models of the news are under attack by content aggregators like facebook and google.
I think a lot of people do love it. Not the company, of course, but many find the service it provides invaluable. Same goes to WeChat for example, I know quite some people who can't give it enough praise and it is arguably a worse offender than Facebook in all conceivable aspects.
First thing that comes to mind is Facebook Events, people around me use it all the time to organise birthday parties, moving, weddings and whatnot. Multiple people said to me that they "no longer use facebook but still use Facebook Events because it is great". Another example would be Messenger, at least here it is the only place where really almost everybody is, Whatsapp had that place before but that is Facebook too. And really, since they removed the weird snapchat-like stories thing from Messenger it there is nothing wrong with it, had Facebook not been what it is, I'd probably like it too.
The events is an interesting one, there aren't many alternatives if you're setting up a private event and IIRC the facebook event experience was good.
I also think "there's nothing wrong with messenger", I don't finds its experience loathsome like Facebook. That said, I also don't "love" it any more than Signal, Whatsapp, iMessage etc. It'll be really interesting to see how the unification of messaging works out - they could "Facebookify " it, I wonder how people will respond if there's a stronger focus on ads.
I would assume people who love WeChat are much more culturally accepting of surveillance given that most of its users are Chinese. Therefore I'm not sure whether a direct comparison makes sense.
Concerning networks they do actually, there were several mass migrations from service to service in China, QQ, RenRen, Weibo, now WeChat. If anything it seems that trendiness trumps the network effect. Now that they have added payments the hurdle might be larger though.
But, in the end all of them are monitored so there is no choice there. The main argument/excuse for acceptance seems to be that it is better to be spied on by your own government than somebody else's.
This quote from an analyst is one reason why I believe the user numbers.
> "It's hard to get people to stop using something they love. People love using these products, and there's these massive attacks that news outlets continue to heap on them, but consumers like these platforms and advertisers follow eyeballs. Most of Facebook's advertisers have no other place to go with a return on investment this good. This is clear proof."