Social networking website Facebook continues to grow and set new benchmarks for other platforms. During the conference call after company’s third quarter results for 2018 were declared, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that about 1.5 billion (150 crore) people use the platform every day. Not just Facebook but platforms owned by it also continue to grow with more than 2.6 billion people using Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger each month, up from around 2.5 billion last quarter.
“We had a solid quarter, and our community and business continue to grow quickly. 2.3 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.5 billion every day. Revenue grew 33% year over year to $13.7 billion,” he said, while adding, “There are now more than 2.6 billion people using Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger each month, up from around 2.5 billion last quarter. But now, on average, more than 2 billion people use at least one of our services every day.”
Facebook’s story products have also grown very quickly – from zero to 1 billion in just two years. Zuckerberg said that more than 1 billion (100 crore) stories are shared across its story platforms and it continues to lead in almost country.
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He said the company is focused on building stories in all its apps as it believes that this is the future and people would want to share in ways that don’t stick around permanently.
“Stories is a medium, like feeds, that can feel very different in very different contexts. So just like most major social apps have feeds — including Pinterest, Twitter, or LinkedIn — but you wouldn’t say that those services do the same things,” he added.
Addressing the challenges, the Facebook CEO said that while WhatsApp Status and Instagram Stories immediately took off and have been huge successes, Facebook Stories started off slower. He said the efforts to shift Facebook from News Feed-first to stories-first hasn’t been as smooth as he had hoped but is important for the Facebook community long term.
“Another challenge is that we’re earlier in developing our ads products for stories, so we don’t make as much money from them yet as we do from feed ads. We’re following our normal playbook here of building out the best consumer products first and focusing on succeeding there before ramping up ads. I’m optimistic that we’ll get ads in stories to perform as well as feed over time, and that the opportunity will be even bigger because it looks like stories will be a bigger medium than feed has been,” he said.
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Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also shared his vision for stories and said that in this quarter, the company improved how ads from News Feed look in Stories. He said this is important for advertisers like Pandora, which uses Facebook and Instagram to reach potential listeners.
“Previously, they would buy Instagram Story ads separately and develop unique creative each time. Now, with Automatic Placements, our technology converts their horizontal video and captions from Facebook into a design that looks native to the vertical Instagram Stories format. For Pandora, this resulted in a 10% lower cost per view than their standalone campaigns — simply by checking a box in our ad tool,” Sandberg added.