Facebook Loses Users for First Time Ever

February 14, 2022, Daily News | Intermediate

Exercise 1

Vocabulary

advertising/ ˈædvərˌtaɪzɪŋ/ Noun

the activity or business of trying to get people to buy products or
services

Example:
Newspapers rely on advertising for most of their revenue.

stock/ stɑːk/ Noun

a share of a company owned by a person or business

Example:
I often read the newspaper to check how my stocks are performing.

value/ ˈvæljuː/ Noun

the amount of money something is worth

Example:
The value of our house has gone down.

net worth/ net wɜːrθ/ Noun

the value of everything a person or organization owns, after any debts
have been taken away

Example:
At the end of 2021, Elon Musk had an estimated net worth of $278.9
billion.

investor/ ɪnˈvestər/ Noun

a person or organization that puts money into businesses, property, etc.,
in order to make more money

Example:
I found several investors who will back my new business.
Exercise 2

Article

Facebook Loses Users for First Time Ever

Facebook has reported a decrease in daily users for the first time in the
company's history.
The company said it lost almost 500,000 daily users during the last three
months of 2021. However, Facebook still has over 1.9 billion daily users.

The news of its first decrease in users, as well as a decrease in advertising

growth, caused the company's stock price to drop more than 26% on
February 3. The drop caused Facebook to lose more than $230 billion in
market value — the biggest one-day loss in history for an American
company.

The decrease in stock price also reduced Facebook owner Mark

Zuckerberg's own net worth by $31 billion. According to Forbes,
Zuckerberg was the fifth richest person in the world in 2021. By February
5, he was 12th — but was still worth almost $85 billion.
In a call with investors, Zuckerberg said, "People have a lot of choices for
how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very
quickly." He also said that Meta, Facebook's parent company, is working
to develop its Reels feature to help it compete with TikTok, the most
popular app in the world among young people.
Similar to TikToks, Reels are short videos that users can post on both
Facebook and Instagram.
As Facebook slows down, TikTok has only continued to grow — from 756
million monthly users at the end of 2020 to 1.2 billion at the end of 2021,
according to data from Business of Apps. At the end of 2021, more
people were visiting TikTok.com than even Google.com, according to
information from Cloudflare Radar.
Exercise 3

Discussion
1. What are your thoughts on the decrease in Facebook's daily users?

2. Do you expect Facebook to continue losing users? Why? Why not?

3. Do you have a Facebook account? If so, have you ever thought

about deleting it? If not, do you plan to get one?

4. Is TikTok popular among young people where you live?

5. What social media platform would you invest in if you had money to
spare?
Exercise 4
Further Discussion

1. How much time per day do you usually spend on the internet?

2. Have your online habits changed at all in recent years?

3. What was the first social media site you used?

4. Do you know anyone who avoids social media?

5. Do you know anyone you'd describe as a social media addict?

Source
This lesson is based on an article by Ryan Coogan.