Mark is Just Trying to Keep Facebook Relevant...

Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Facebook will be switching to community moderation of posts instead of handling that in-house using a system like X's Community Notes.

Many believe this is a political move, and while it might be a part of it, there's another important side to this - demand. And the truth is, demand for Facebook hasn't grown in several years. It's worse, demand has dropped substantially, losing Facebook hundreds of millions of potential users.

Let's have a look at the numbers and you'll see what I mean.

In 2017, which feels like multiple lifetimes ago, Facebook's app saw 601M new downloads, according to our estimates. That's more than a half billion new downloads, not redownloads, in a single year!

Things got even better in 2018 as downloads rose to 630M. Downloads fluctuated a little, but then 2021 hit and things just weren't the same.

Facebook had its biggest drop in downloads and I imagine several alarms were going off in Meta headquarters. Our estimates show downloads dropped by more than 100M to 488M for the year.

Yes, Facebook lost in one year what most apps won't see in their lifetime. That's not good.

2022 wasn't much better with downloads remaining fairly constant. And that's a good thing because by 2023 downloads were even lower, almost dropping below 400M.

In just a few short years Facebook lost hundreds of millions of eyeballs that won't view ads. That has to hurt the bottom line.

2024 was a bit better. Downloads rose to $513M, which is higher than the last few years but still a lot smaller than 2017/18.

So maybe changing Facebook's moderation practices is just a political move, or, maybe it's Mark trying to undo whatever caused the big downloads drop, which I see as a proxy for relevance. Especially now that a ban on TikTok is in sight and those users will need an alternative.