>If you look at monthly active users, you'll see a line that goes straight and up.
It's a question of quality though, not quantity. Facebook's MAU growth is almost entirely international users from the developing world at this point, who are orders of magnitude less profitable than US users. They will remain an advertising juggernaut forever, but their cultural relevance has passed.
It's true that they have less US user growth, but its incredible to consider that they still have US user growth.
> Facebook will experience its slowest (US) growth ever in 2021 at just 0.8%. [0]
That's with a ~61% penetration in US internet users. Instagram still has pretty impressive US user growth
> This statistic shows the projected Instagram user growth in the United States from 2018 to 2023. In 2020, the social network's user figures grew by 6.2 percent compared to the previous year. In 2021, the development is estimated to slow to a 3.7 percent annual growth rate. [1]
The fact that revenue per user is much higher in the US and Canada ($53.56 per user) than Europe ($16.87) and much less in Asia ($4.05) [2] is an opportunity. They can get aim to bring these numbers up and continue revenue growth. They did exactly that. For instance revenue per user in Europe went from 10.64 to 16.87 from Q1 2020 to Q4 2020.
I couldn't find a single statistic that would even suggest that Facebook's growth is in trouble in the foreseeable future.
This points to a bigger issue with modern journalism. Their goal is to feed subscribers what they want to read. And their subscriber base is skeptical of facebook and wants to read about how their downfall is just around the corner. They've been doing this for years. But they don't bother to do basic sanity checks on their claims. You can hate Facebook all you want, but don't delude yourself in the process.
This has been true for quite a while, the stock price keeps going up but it can take quite a while for the break to actually come.
Also, I think what people heavily underestimate with FB and GOOGL is that the majority of their growth is coming from volume, which they are 100% in control of over the short-term.
All they need to do is add another ad to the page, and their revenue goes up. The problem is that, over the long-term, this results in less and less product. With the targeting changes, with the valuable US/young userbase shrinking rapidly (amongst young people, Facebook isn't even in the top five social networks), it is very clear that management are turning all the dials they can now but this can only end one way (I also suspect a lot of the "international growth" is not real).
It's a question of quality though, not quantity. Facebook's MAU growth is almost entirely international users from the developing world at this point, who are orders of magnitude less profitable than US users. They will remain an advertising juggernaut forever, but their cultural relevance has passed.