Where has Meta*’s audience gone?

Publication date: 03 Aug 2022

The beginning of 2022 was rich in various events. This included a court ruling on 21 March 2022 declaring Meta*, one of the largest Internet corporations, to be extremist and banning Facebook* and Instagram*, its social media products, in Russia. Official access to their websites and apps was blocked, with a clear impact on audience size and quality, advertising costs and other metrics.  Let’s see what happened to the FB audience after the ban and where users went for interesting content. 

* Meta Corporation and its products (Facebook, Instagram) have been declared extremist and banned in Russia.

Facebook offers new interface to bring back audience

At the end of Q2 2022, the number of daily active Facebook users* in Europe stood at 303 million, down from 307 million at the end of the same period in 2021. The monthly audience is also decreasing: 420 million users at the end of June 2021 and 407 million at the end of June 2022.

This data is contained in a report by Meta Corporation. The analysis includes only FB users (without Instagram, WhatsApp and other products). At the same time, Russia belongs to the European region.

The decline in the number of users is primarily attributed to the restriction of access to the social network in Russia. The drop in user activity has had a negative impact on the company’s ability to display advertisements. It is logical that this further led to a drop in revenue in Europe as well, as it was $6.7 billion in Q2 compared to $7.2 billion a year ago.

In order to attract more viewers and retain users longer, Facebook is developing new products. For example, the social network will offer more entertainment content. To this end, the user interface will now be divided into a “Home” feed with entertainment recommendations and a “Channels” feed, where you can see content from “friends”, publications from subscribed groups, and favorites.

Advertising on Telegram has increased in price by 1.5 times

Advertising campaigns in Telegram have become almost 50% more expensive over the year. According to a SocialJet research, the average CPM in the messenger’s ad campaign was 734.3 roubles in March-June 2021, while over the same period this year it stood at 1,088 roubles. Thus, the price per 1,000 impressions (CPM) in Telegram increased by 48.2%.

Also, budgets for seeding and launches via Telegram Ads have increased by 591%, according to analysts at Tochka Bank.

Not only is the cost of advertising changing, but there is also a shift in the distribution of demand for the different topics of Telegram channels.

• In spring, the most popular channels were: economics and finance (17% of total demand), marketing (9%) and urban communities (9%).
• By the end of June, the most popular channels were society news and media (22% of the total demand), economy and business (14%), entertainment and humor communities (10%). Although the Economy and Business category continues to be the most in-demand, much has also changed within the topic. For instance, investment tools advertising almost completely disappeared, whereas credit offers increased significantly.

According to experts, the sharp jump in advertising prices occurred amid the blocking of Facebook and Instagram, as well as the disabling of Google’s monetization tools for Russian advertisers.  You could say that as of 1 August 2022, messenger is becoming one of the key advertising tools. The situation continues to change, but it is already evident that advertising volumes on Telegram will grow, with experts predicting an even sharper increase in demand among advertisers in the autumn.

Video service Yappy: skyrocketing audience and content growth  

In the first six months of 2022, the monthly audience of video platform Yappy exceeded 4 million users. As the company itself points out, the growth in the number of creators led to an increase in the volume of uploaded content – for six months it grew by more than 3 times and exceeded 2 million videos.

Most of Yappy’s audience is in Moscow (10%), the Krasnodar region (5.2%), St Petersburg (4.6%) and Almaty (3.7%). On the other hand, the most active increase in creators (video creators) was noted in Anapa, Stavropol, Nizhny Novgorod, and Novorossiysk.

Since the beginning of 2022, the video platform has expanded its geographical presence and attracted users from Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. There are also plans to add monetization to the app, update the content functionality and audience attraction tools, chat rooms, and other updates.