Meta Experienced Audience and Ad Traffic Erosion in Q3

Facebook’s still-huge audience keeps eroding, and even Instagram saw a drop, while Threads continues to fall short

In the third quarter, Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META) generated excitement with everything from AI innovation to the launch of a new social network, Threads. Yet there remain warning signs about the health of its core advertising-fueled digital business.

Key takeaways

• Traffic to Meta’s business portal, business.facebook.com, was down 11.4% in Q3, according to Similarweb estimates. We monitor this statistic as a topline indicator of interest in placing ads or otherwise doing business with Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta brands.
• Traffic to facebook.com was down -6.4% worldwide in Q3, while traffic to instagram.com was up 2.9%.
• In the US, monthly active users for Meta’s family of mobile apps dropped across the board: -3.8% for Facebook, -8.2% for Instagram, -1.7% for Messenger, and -3.8% for Messenger. Worldwide, Instagram and WhatsApp usage were up, while Facebook app usage and Messenger app usage were down, as detailed below.
• Threads could be a future source of growth for Meta, but it still has not regained more than a fraction of the momentum from its first weeks in operation.

Fewer businesses looking to do business with Meta

Traffic to the business.facebook.com portal that businesses use to purchase ads and otherwise promote themselves has been declining, with a bigger drop in Q3 than in Q1 or Q2. However, Meta sometimes generates more revenue than we expect from this metric, perhaps by closing deals with big brands who don’t necessarily place orders through the portal.

Meta’s apps all saw usage fall in the US in Q3

Meta’s mobile apps command huge audiences, but those audiences have been eroding over time. Instagram’s digital strength has often balanced losses for Facebook but in Q3, its monthly active users in the US dropped by -8.2%, while Facebook was down -3.8%.

Worldwide, where we have better visibility into app usage on Android devices, the picture is slightly different with gains for Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook and Messenger still saw declines, down -2.3% and  -6.4%, respectively.

Facebook also still has a big audience on the web, although it has been seeing some erosion, with visits down -6.4% worldwide in Q3. Instagram gained 2.9%.

Threads yet to recapture the initial surge of excitement

Threads attracted a frenzy of interest when it launched in July – particularly during the first few days after launch – coinciding with one of the many crises at Twitter (as it was known then) on its way to becoming X. However, the explosion of interest soon subsided to a dull roar.

In the US, where Threads attracted the most attention, September Threads usage on Android was down 40% from where it was in July.

For perspective, Threads is still far ahead of Bluesky, the other up-and-coming social network touted as an alternative to X – although to be fair, Bluesky is still officially in an invite-only beta phase rather than courting viral growth. The chart below includes combined estimates of monthly active users for iOS and Android, combined, in the US.

Worldwide, the lead for Threads over Bluesky is even bigger, based on Android, with 65 million monthly active users on Threads compared with 2 million for Bluesky. In other words, Threads has a huge digital audience for an app that just launched a couple of months ago, even though it pales in comparison to X, let alone Instagram or Facebook.

Meanwhile in the metaverse …

Remember when Meta was going to be all about the metaverse, thus the name change from Facebook? Well, that’s still part of the plan with sales of Meta Quest 3D headsets and other hardware as a growing part of the business. The website promoting Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse experience saw a traffic boom over the summer, perhaps indicating that part of the business is gaining momentum.

Will we see an upside surprise?

The picture painted by these digital metrics is probably gloomier than the forecasts of most financial analysts, who are also watching Meta’s cost control initiatives and attempt to diversify away from advertising as its primary source of revenue. Meta may announce stronger results than we would expect from checking web traffic to its business and advertising portal, as it has before, but we have to believe it is also looking for ways to reinvigorate audience growth.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".