Facebook put out a new figure for its app use, stating that 2.5 billion people each month use one of its products – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger.

David Wehner, CFO of Facebook, said the number is “our best estimate of our de-duplicated audience across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp”.

The company said the metric “better reflects our community”, by excluding people who have multiple active accounts on a single app, and those that use more than one Facebook service.

The new figures come shortly after Facebook announced it had more than one billion active accounts on Instagram. In its results call, Facebook said that since its acquisition of the app Instagram, it has been augmented by features including Stories, Direct and recently IGTV.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, said that “we believe Instagram has been able to use Facebook’s infrastructure to grow more than twice as quickly as it would have on its own”.

Integrated approach
Zuckerberg also said the company’s strategy was to use Facebook’s computing infrastructure, business platforms and security systems across all of its apps.

“Today, we have six data centres around the globe, and we’re working on building eight more. We’re using AI systems and our global community operations team to fight spam, harassment, hate speech, and terrorism across all our apps to keep people safe. This is incredibly useful for apps like WhatsApp and Instagram as it helps us manage the challenges of hyper-growth there more effectively,” he said.

In noting that Facebook was facing slowed revenue growth in future, Wehner said that this was in part attributable to its promotion of new services such as Stories, which “currently have lower levels of monetisation”. But he also said that this presents “an area of continued growth opportunity”, particularly for Instagram, where Stories are more popular.

With regard to monetisation of its Messenger service, Facebook is being “very slow and deliberate”, Sheryl Sandberg, COO, added. With regard to WhatsApp, she said the company is “very focused there on the user experience”, while noting that it is testing its WhatsApp Business app, which is “further out, but we think it has potential as well”.