Downfall of Meta empire

A company that was once listed in the top 5 valuable US companies, and was adding 100 million active users almost every year has dropped more than 70% in its value in one year.

The downfall of Facebook started when Facebook lost $230 billion in a single day on Feb 02, 2022.

The biggest reason for Meta’s downfall was data breach, when personal information of 87 million Facebook users was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Firm used this data to manipulate the voters during the 2016 US Presidential elections.

Data Scandals

Another reason for Meta’s downfall is users leaving Meta apps and going to its competitors like TikTok. When Meta saw that their user base is now leaving them, they copied the idea from TikTok and created Instagram Reels and a new app- Lasso which failed and shut down in July 2020.

Copying the Competitors

After App Tracking Transparency feature from Apple, Facebook was not able to track user activities without user consent and its revenue got hit by around $10 billion.

Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature

Apple updated its App Store rules asking for a 30% cut on sales of boosts for posts which affected Facebook and Instagram directly.

Apple’s new App Store rules

Meta takes 97% of the advertising revenues and only 3% goes to content creators. This is way less than YouTube & TikTok and is a major reason that creators are moving away from Facebook & Instagram to YouTube & TikTok.

Concerns from Content Creators

Confessions from Meta Employees

Another reason for Meta’s decline is shocking confessions from its own employees claiming that Meta is manipulating the people and countries using its power.

Meta invested $10 billion in Facebook Reality Labs and created its first Metaverse game Horizon World which got negative reviews after its release and now Meta is struggling to gain users on its platform.

Investment in Metaverse