Facebook parent Meta Platforms posted its first decline in revenue and issued a muted outlook on its digital advertising revenues. The US social media giant continues to lose market shares to its fast-growing Chinese competitor TikTok. The company reported quarterly revenue of $28.8 billion, down almost 1% from a year earlier and slightly below the $28.9 billion analysts expected. It is the first time the social media giant posted a quarterly revenue drop from the previous year.
“We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business,” explained CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s always hard to predict how deep or how long these cycles will be, but I’d say that the situation seems worse than it did a quarter ago,” he said on an earnings call.
Meta and other tech giants are experiencing a slowdown in the digital advertising market. Google parent Alphabet Inc. on Tuesday reported the slowest growth rate since the second quarter of 2020, when the pandemic stimulated advertising growth. Twitter, too, reported a decline in revenue.
