The era of Facebook’s nonstop growth has long since come to an end. Although the company is far from the point at which it might start to shrink, its growth in the US and Canada, as well as Europe, has stopped entirely and appears to occasionally decline.
In its 2018 third quarter earnings report out today, the social network confirmed that the number of daily active users in US and Canada has remained flat at 185 million, while the number of European users has slipped from 279 million to 278 million. The latter may be a direct result of recent European privacy regulations, namely GDPR, which initially caused Facebook to lose 1 million monthly active users after it went into effect in May.
Overall, the company continues to grow thanks to international expansion, adding 9 percent year over year to its daily active user base for a total of 1.47 billion people. The total number of monthly active users grew 10 percent from this time a year ago, to 2.27 billion people.
But despite that, and the fact that the company continues to grow its digital advertising business at an astonishing rate, the rate at which Facebook is growing continues to decline quarter to quarter and year over year. And it’s no longer growing in the markets in which it makes the most revenue per user (North America and Europe). So the fear of more user falloff and a lack of new user retention — and the inevitable ad revenue decline that would instigate — has some critics and analysts worried about its future.