Meta: annual revenue and net income 2007-2021

Meta’s annual revenue

Toward the end of 2021, Facebook Inc, which owns social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, rebranded and changed its name to Meta. This strategic rebranding came as part of a step towards the metaverse.

In 2021, Meta’s revenue was over 117 billion U.S. dollars, up by over 31 billion U.S. dollars on the previous year. Within the last decade, the company has increased its overall revenue by over 114 billion U.S. dollars. The majority of Meta’s profits come from its advertising revenue, which generated 114.93 billion U.S. dollars in 2021.

Meta’s total Family of Apps revenue for 2021 amounted to 115.66 billion U.S. dollars. Additionally, Meta’s Reality Labs, the company’s VR division, generated 2.27 billion dollars. Meta’s marketing expenditure for 2021 amounted to just over 14 billion U.S. dollars, up from 11.6 billion U.S. dollars on the previous year.

Increasing audience base despite privacy misgivings

Meta’s user numbers have continued to grow steadily throughout past years. In the fourth quarter of 2021, there was a total of 3.59 billion worldwide users across all of Meta’s platforms. For this same time frame, the company recorded 427 million monthly active users across Europe.

Downloads of Meta’s app Oculus, for which virtual reality headsets are required, increased greatly from 2020 to 2021, reaching a total of 10.62 million downloads by the end of last year. Up until 2021, downloads had grown in a steady manner but from 2020 to 2021, they more than doubled.

User numbers have increased despite data security issues and past controversy such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. There remains skepticism surrounding the idea of the metaverse in which Meta aims to immerse itself. Of surveyed adults in the United States, the majority said that they were concerned about their privacy if Meta were to succeed in creating the metaverse.