For the first time in the history of Facebook marked decline in the number of visitors from the United States and Canada. By results quarterly report the social network has lost a million users daily.
In the last three months of 2017 was 184 million a day, while in the same period last year — 185. on Wednesday Mark Zuckerberg said that now the total mass of people daily spends Facebook 50 million hours less than before.
The cause of the fall statistics from recent policy changes, particularly the decline of the shows entertaining videos. The purpose of this step is to move the focus c passive content consumption to the development of communities and quality of connections between people.
The founder of the largest international social network is not concerned about the outflow of visitors, Zuckerberg is convinced that the changes will benefit groups and businesses in the long term.
The effectiveness of the strategy is confirmed by financial data. According to the report, during the last quarter of 2017 Facebook advertising earned 48% more than in the last three months of 2016. And this despite the fact that under the new rules, the social network shows less ads from advertisers.
In particular, promotion of the cryptocurrency, ICO (initial offering of coins) and binary options from late January completely banned.
January 12, Zuckerberg announced a change of the algorithm of selection of entries in the feeds, adding that the posts from friends will now be a priority, and news articles and advertising will recede into the background.
According to estimates by Bloomberg, after this statement, Zuckerberg suddenly lost $3.3 billion due to falling stock prices Facebook.
He later revised the strategy and noted that the change of algorithm will not affect the local news, «useful to solve problems and community development».
