Bad Luck Zuck: Facebook Forecast Predicts Revenue Drop for First Time in a Decade

Facebook’s forecasts for its revenue growth predict that Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire could suffer its first revenue drop in over a decade. Zuckerberg admitted that Apple’s recent privacy changes have put a major dent in his advertising business, which is fuelled by the personal data of billions of users around the world.

CNBC reports that before the first quarter of 2022 Facebook’s revenue growth never sunk below double digits, but in the second quarter, the company’s revenue may not see any growth whatsoever. Although Facebook shares jumped by around 20 percent in extended trading on Wednesday following surprisingly positive profit reports, the firm’s business has flatlined and doesn’t seem likely to rebound until at least the second half of 2022.

In an earnings report for the first quarter, Facebook (now known as Meta) gave revenue guidance for the current period of $28 billion to $30 billion, behind the $30.6 billion average analyst estimate. The poor forecast follows year-over-year growth of just seven percent in the first quarter, representing the slowest pace of expansion in Facebook’s 10-year history as a public company.

At this time last year, Facebook was growing by approximately 50 percent in a pandemic-fueled boom as the economy reopened. On an earnings call earlier this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed the slowdown was due to both internal and macro factors. Zuckerberg blames a focus on short-term videos which are a “drag on revenue,” as they don’t monetize as well as traditional ads.

Facebook is also being affected by privacy changes to Apple’s iOS and “softness in e-commerce after the acceleration we saw during the pandemic.” Zuckerberg also noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had an effect on the company.

“We’ve been blocked in Russia and we decided to stop accepting ads from Russian advertisers globally,” Zuckerberg said. “And we’ve also seen effects on business globally following the start of the war.”

Read more at CNBC here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com