Facebook is Still King as the Social Media Giant Hits 2.5bn Monthly Active Users

Facebook, has hit new highs with its user base. The social media giant has reportedly reached 2.5 billion monthly active users (MAUs) in Q4 2019 on its platform, sporting a 2% increase from the 2.45 billion users in Q3 2019.

While there were about 1.52 billion people using Facebook daily in December 2018, currently the platform reports 1.66 billion daily active users. The new figures represent a 2.4% increase from the 1.62 billion in Q3.

Across its family of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp) the platform has 2.89 billion monthly active users, an increase of 9% year on year.

This increase in numbers indicates that Facebook might be back to winning ways despite the troubles it has passed through recently.

In recent times, the tech giant has faced heavy criticisms over its poor handling of user data, with many users raising the red flag over the privacy of their data. Some of the issues that spurred the concerns was the improper sharing of user data with Cambridge Analytica for the US 2016 elections.

More recently, while there has been calls for regulation of political ads by social media platforms, Facebook made known its decision not to police political adverts on its site for false content. It has since come under fire for that decision.

This has seen the platform working hard to improve its privacy and regain its user’s trust. As a result, the platform now has over 1,000 engineers working on privacy – an investment that has increased the platform’s expenses.

As regards, content moderation, the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg had previously warned that addressing hate speech, election interference, and other issues would be costly. But nevertheless, the platform made an income of $7.3 billion, up only 7% YoY compared to 61% growth in 2019.

“We had a good quarter and a strong end to the year as our community and business continue to grow. We remain focused on building services that help people stay connected to those they care about.”

Mark Zuckerburg.

Going forward, the platform expects significant revenue loss owing to privacy-related regulations like Europe’s GDPR, and changes by Apple and Google in their browsers to block third-party tracking as well as the its new limits to user’s data collection.