Myspace is, believe it or not, still around; however, it has been irrelevant for so long that I needed to look it up to remember if the name used camel case or not (it doesn’t). It does, though, still seem to loom large in the mind of Meta skeptics certain that the mid-2000’s social network’s fate was predictive for the company that supplanted it.
The problem with this narrative is that Meta is still adding users: the company is up to 2.93 billion Daily Active Users (DAUs), an increase of 50 million, and 3.71 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs), an increase of 60 million. Moreover, this isn’t all Instagram and WhatsApp: Facebook itself increased its DAUs by 16 million (to 1.98 billion) and its MAUs by 24 million (to 2.96 billion). Granted, all of that growth, at least in the case of Facebook, was in Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world, but the U.S. and Europe were flat, not declining; given that Facebook long ago completely saturated those markets, it is meaningful that the service is not seeing any churn.
The obvious retort is that sure, users may occasionally open Meta’s apps when they are bored, but they are spending most of their time in other apps like TikTok, and that that time is coming at the expense of Meta’s apps, particularly Instagram.
There is, to be clear, good reason to think that TikTok is having a big impact on Instagram specifically and Facebook broadly, but that impact, to the extent it is being felt, is in depressing growth, not in reversing it.