Turns out that too much success can be a bad thing. Or in Mark Zuckerberg’s case, succeeding so much that he reached the very limits of humanity.
Facebook’s shares dropped 20% this morning, with Mark Zuckerberg personally losing $12 Billion of his personal fortune, after their second quarter results announcement. One significant part of the announcement was that, at least in the USA and Europe, Facebook’s growth has flatlined.
The reason? They’ve signed up practically everyone in those areas who owns a digital device. That’s about 97% of all American and 90% of all European adults, according to WIRED. The numbers actually went down in the EU over the last three months, due to new privacy regulations that saw some users deactivate their accounts.
In layman’s terms, Facebook can’t grow any bigger because Facebook has signed up everyone possible, either currently or previously, to Facebook.
Facebook, rn.
It’s bad news for investors, who see Facebook’s user base (y’know, us) as merely a means to an end to ad revenue. As as anyone who’s ever done business studies in high school can tell you, the less eyes seeing an ad, the less valuable those ads ultimately are.
Which leads to the other reason Facebook’s stocks tanked – they revealed the real cost of combatting all that fake news on their platform. In short, it’ll be a lot; enough to impact their profit margin for the next few years.
I guess shareholders don’t care about actually protecting users and just care about money.
Surprising, I know.