Facebook's User Growth Stalls Where It Hurts

Considering its size, it’s not a surprise that Facebook’s user growth has been slowing down recently. After all, the social network has more than 2.3 billion (!) monthly active users while the International Telecommunications Union puts the number of global internet users at around 3.9 billion.

What hurts the company though, is the fact that the regions most affected by the slowdown are the ones where Facebook generates the lion’s share of its revenue. Over the past three months, the social network has added just 2 million users in North America and 5 million users across Europe, which is where it generated 50 and 25 percent of its total revenue in the past quarter, respectively.

The following chart shows how much more valuable a North American user is to Facebook compared to users in the Asia-Pacific region, which is where the social network is currently seeing the strongest growth of its user base. In Q4 2018, average revenue per user amounted to $34.86 in the U.S. and Canada and only $2.96 in Asia-Pacific.