About a quarter of world's population is on Facebook now as number of users grew to an average of 2 billion

The number of Facebook users grew to an average of two billion in December 2022, which is about a quarter of the world's population. This comes after a time when Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said that 2022 was a 'challenging' year for his company. This bigger-than-expected growth helped drive new optimism about the company, which has been under pressure as its costs and advertising sales slump.

The share of the parent company of Facebook, Meta surged more than 15 per cent in after-hours trade as Zuckerberg declared 2023 as the 'year of efficiency' and said that he was focused on more cuts.

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Zuckerberg said, "We're in a different environment now", pointing to the firm's revenue, which saw a decline in 2022 for the first time in its history after years of double-digit growth.

"We don't anticipate that that's going to continue, but I also don't think it's going to go back to the way it was before."

The parent company of Facebook, Meta, also owns Instagram and WhatsApp. It announced a major restructuring last year, including a reduction in office space and cutting of 11,000 jobs or about 13 per cent of the staff.The firm defended its move as it helped them cut $4.6bn last year, hitting its profits, which were almost cut in half. It still brought in $23.2bn in profit for the year.

"2022 was a challenging year but I think we ended it having made good progress", Mr Zuckerberg said.
In the three months to December, the firm said revenue was $32.2bn, down 4% year-on-year. But that was better than many analysts had expected.

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Investors were alarmed last year by Facebook's first-ever decline in daily Facebook users in its history and signalled that it was focusing more on investments in the virtual reality area, known as the metaverse. But in December, the number of users on the site was up 4 per cent from a year earlier, adding even in Europe and the US and Canada.

Meta said that the number of people active across all of its apps each day was up by 5 per cent year-on-year.

Zuckerberg said the company was making progress with its video product,i.e, Reels, which it has been focused on as it faces off with rivals such as TikTok, which have gained traction, especially among younger users. Mr Zuckerberg said those efforts were starting to pay off, and ad dollars were starting to follow users to the videos.

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