Users spend 50 million hours less on Facebook
Facebook promises to make the time spent on the online network more meaningful and shows less viral videos. Users immediately spent 50 million hours a day less on Facebook. That's fine, says founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook's new course of showing members less video has quickly led to shorter usage times. Last quarter, users spent 50 million fewer hours a day on Facebook because of it, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. "That shows how serious we are about this." Given Facebook's size, that's only about two minutes per user per day. But shorter usage times can also have an impact on business figures if fewer ads are clicked on.
Change of strategy
Zuckerberg stressed that this was something Facebook was putting up with in order to make time spent on the online network more valuable. He had announced a sweeping change in strategy, stating that users would see less news and content from Facebook pages and instead more posts from friends and family. "Helping people connect is more important than increasing time of use," Zuckerberg now explained. That will also secure Facebook's future in the long run, he said. Last quarter, a booming online advertising business drove Facebook revenue to a new high. The online network took in just under $13 billion. That was a 47 percent year-on-year increase. Profits rose by a fifth to $4.27 billion, Facebook announced after the U.S. stock market closed on Wednesday. Facebook now has 2.13 billion monthly active users. Daily, 1.4 billion of them came to the platform. That was 32 million more than three months earlier - the slowest growth since 2015. Analysts had expected a faster increase in user numbers.
