The biggest social network in the world isn’t getting any bigger.
Meta posted its fourth quarter earnings Wednesday, sharing financials that disappointed Wall Street enough to send its stock into a nose dive. Shares of the company, still trading under the ticker symbol FB for now, plunged 20% as the numbers hit.
While Meta’s last quarter saw some expected trends play out, including Apple’s iOS privacy changes dampening its ad business, it also surfaced the novel fact that Facebook, Meta’s core app, is no longer attracting new users.
Facebook’s monthly active users (MAUs) remained flat from the third quarter of 2021 to the fourth at 2.9 billion. Worse, its daily active users (DAUs) fell from 1.93 to 1.929 billion in the same period — a first for Facebook, which is known for a growth-at-all-costs approach.
Some of this is intuitive. Facebook is a mature product (to put it gently) …
