View: Mark Zuckerberg’s 20-year formula for success has expired
Facebook Dating, which was meant to challenge Tinder? Is anyone viewing Facebook Watch, a supposed rival to Netflix? How about the Facebook Gaming portal, once billed as its foray into cloud gaming and an effort to take on streamer platforms Twitch and YouTube? Today it’s littered with low-rent titles offering little more to the player than your typical fruit machine. Even some of the more popular ideas must be shared with warning labels — scammers are everywhere on Facebook Marketplace.
Fortunately for Mark Zuckerberg, the barnstorming success of other parts of Meta Platforms Inc. — the rebranding of the business meant to reflect his vision of the future — means its duds can hide out within the comically cluttered navigation menu on the main Facebook app. Besides, for 20 years, use of the main Facebook service — known as the “blue” app internally — has remained remarkably resilient. It attracted 3.07 billion monthly active users as of last quarter, the company said. Though, tellingly, Meta said it would no longer break out the number in future reports.
The Blue app graveyard, and what it represents, is something worth thinking about as the company enters its 21st year with a record high valuation above $1 trillion. Investors see Zuckerberg as a weatherer of storms — bucking worries about the shift to mobile and, more recently, worries that Apple Inc.’s privacy changes would blast a hole in its targeted ads business model, which in 2023 accounted for 97.8% of its total revenue.
