The lockdown and Facebook

The quarantine lockdown to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus is raising the number of Facebook users. The Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on a conference call, revealed a number of some new metrics mentioning a remarkable increment in Facebook usage during this quarantine lockdown.

In the previous month, more than 3 billion people who use the internet logged onto this social platform, and it includes some of its central app as well, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger – as disclosed by Zuckerberg. The number comprises two-thirds of the total internet users of the world. This was an achievement for the platform that reported the average monthly active users of approximately 2.6 billion in the first quarter.

The prediction

The communications tools of the company noticed a huge increment in some of the past weeks, with the Facebook’s CEO disclosing more granular metrics that both video and voice calling usage had increased twice compared with the period before lockdown. Also, the views on Instagram and Facebook Live videos became doubled, and the amount of time on group video calling had increased 1000% in these weeks.

The company previously predicted that the usage of the platform would return to normal once shelter-in-place was broken off, though Mark Zuckerberg mentioned chances Facebook could understand during this lockdown. He said that when the world changed faster, people had new requirements, and that indicates there were more things to create.

On Wednesday, Facebook reported its Q1 earnings and shared that they had earned the revenues of approximately $17.74 billion during this quarter. When the company shared that the usage of specific services had increased, they also revealed that the company had observed a remarkable decrease in the demand for ads at the completion of the quarter and also shared that they had noticed a flat year-over-year expansion in the first fewer weeks of this month.