The social media juggernaut famously founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 can finally buy beer.
Over the last quarter-century, Facebook, which turned 21 on February 4, has evolved from a social networking tool for college students and a place to poke your middle school crush into a social media Goliath that has fundamentally upended the practice of digital advertising.
Once called TheFacebook, the company’s purview as Meta includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and myriad other VR/AR technologies, including its Meta Quest headsets, placed as part of a significant bet on the metaverse, which has been followed by a bigger bet on generative AI and smart glasses.
Meta is the second largest advertising platform behind Google, with 96% of its $164 billion in 2024 revenue coming from advertising. More than 3.3 billion people use one or more of its apps every day, according to the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call.
Historically, a majority of that ad revenue has come from Facebook, and according to the Pew Research Center, 68% of US adults use the platform. But that number has remained relatively flat since 2016, according to Pew, and as Facebook has gotten older, its user base has aged even more quickly, with the percentage of US teens saying they use the platform dropping from 71% in 2015 to 33% in 2023. At the same time, the content on the platform has changed, whether that’s the generative AI “slop” appearing in user feeds or Meta’s rollback of content moderation policies that stand to open the door to more hate speech. So how did it get to this point—and can Facebook get its mojo back?
Hit rewind
Facebook unveiled its ads platform in 2007, beginning with small, sponsored posts designed to seamlessly integrate into the platform’s interface.
“Going out and basically redefining and creating their own ad format at the time was absolutely revolutionary,” Brendan Gahan, co-founder and CEO of the social agency Creator Authority, told Marketing Brew. “I remember being sort of skeptical. Like, ‘Who do they think they are that they can launch their own ad unit in the era of banner ads?’”
Advertisers weren’t always impressed, and it wasn’t perfect. After Facebook went public in 2012, an eMarketer analyst told the New York Times that “advertisers need more proof that actual advertising on Facebook offers a return on investment,” a somewhat quaint observation considering the volume of ad dollars the platform now commands.
As the platform’s ad tools grew more precise, its cultural relevance grew, too. In 2012, suburban high schoolers suddenly became obsessed with finding the Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony after a social media campaign kicked off by the advocacy group Invisible Children. Two years later, the Ice Bucket Challenge raised $115 million for ALS research after the trend went viral on the platform. There was planking, posts about Farmville, and seemingly every viral flash mob (so, so many flash mobs…) highlighting how social platforms could reach and influence audiences in ways that traditional media platforms couldn’t.
Unfavorable portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network aside, Facebook’s rise has not been without controversies. Those include, but are not limited to:
- In 2016, when Facebook began prioritizing traffic to video content based on inaccurate data that prompted major shifts from publishers in a period known as the “pivot to video.” When Facebook shifted gears again, media industry layoffs ensued.
- When the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used Facebook user data to target voters on behalf of the Trump campaign ahead of the 2016 election, highlighting how accessible Facebook’s user data was at the time and how it could be used by third parties. (The case is still being settled—and the fallout is still being felt—worldwide.)
- In the summer of 2020, when major brands, including Dunkin’, Unilever, and Ford, pulled ads from the platform in protest of the company’s handling of misinformation and hate speech. (Though the action led to bad press for the platform, it barely left a dent in the company’s bottom line.)
- In 2021, when a whistleblower (who later revealed herself to be Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook) leaked internal documents to the Wall Street Journal that showed the company prioritizing user engagement over safety—and specifically that Meta buried research showing that Instagram could be especially harmful to teen girls.
At the beginning of the year, Meta announced an about-face on content moderation in what has been viewed largely as a move designed to pander to the right and President Donald Trump (who, in a coffee-table book published last year, wrote that Zuckerberg could “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he were to interfere in the 2024 election and who recently agreed to a $25 million settlement over a lawsuit he brought against the company for banning him from its platforms after the Capitol riot). In January, Meta ended its DEI programs and announced changes to its Hateful Conduct policy that, per Axios, allow for “people who are women, transgender, gay, or immigrants to be targeted in ways prohibited for other groups.”
Advertisers don’t love the chances of showing up next to hate speech, as evidenced by the fact that advertisers began fleeing X following content moderation changes. According to Business Insider, Nicola Mendelsohn, head of Meta’s global business group, spent the month of January assuring advertisers that the company remained committed to brand safety and suitability despite the Hateful Conduct policy updates. On Meta’s most recent earnings call, CFO Susan Li said the company hasn’t seen any “noticeable impact from [its] content policy changes on advertiser spend.”
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Even if advertisers continue spending, a perhaps more pressing concern for Facebook is its perception, not among advertisers, but among many younger people.
Reengaging youth
On Meta’s Q4 2024 earnings call last month, Zuckerberg said that “there are a lot of opportunities to make [Facebook] way more culturally influential than it is today,” acknowledging that it hasn’t been a top product focus over the last several years. This year, he said, the company plans to make it one.
In recent years, Facebook has courted creators as part of an effort to youth-ify its user base at the same time that it navigates increasing regulations aimed at curtailing minors’ social media usage. In January, Meta announced a “Breakthrough Bonus” program, in which it will pay some TikTok creators to post Reels to Instagram and Facebook.
Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of the influencer marketing agency Obviously, told us that she sees an opportunity for Facebook to start fresh with younger users. “Millennials got [Facebook] in college and high school,” she said. “There are a few generations below millennials now, so I think that it can be seen as an introduction, rather than a reintroduction, to a lot of people.”
If brands remain interested and Facebook effectively courts creators, “I think you’re looking at something very compelling,” Karwowski said.
That’s a big if—and other platforms, like TikTok, have had more success courting creators. TikTok’s uncertain fate in the US is one of the major trends Meta is watching that could impact its family of apps this year, Zuckerberg said on a recent earnings call, and the company hasn’t exactly been friendly to the ByteDance-owned app, paying a lobbying firm to run a smear campaign against the platform in 2022. While Meta’s lobbying expenditures surged ahead of the passage of the divest-or-ban law targeting TikTok, the company denied lobbying lawmakers in support of the legislation.
Shortly before the TikTok ban was due to go into effect in January, some TikTok creators said that they didn’t see posting on Facebook as a truly viable alternative.
“It’s something I would literally never do,” creator Maddy Mitchell told us. “Facebook is really, really dead as far as I’m concerned.”
Mitchell, who worked in brand social media management before becoming a full-time creator, said that she finds that Facebook feels “decades behind” in terms of its relevancy and views its feed and the AI content on the platform as a detriment to using it. It’s not just Facebook: Instagram, she said, “has gotten to a place where it’s hard to find things, too.”
If its execs’ remarks to investors are any indication, Meta plans to continue to spend billions on AI-powered features, including in-feed content recommendations, bot accounts, personalized AI-generated images, and AI-powered ad-creation tools. That could also turn users away. Much has been written about how generative AI has taken over the internet, including Facebook feeds, and contributed to an overall “enshittification” of online spaces.
“The big thing is going to be, what’s the content experience when you log in [to Facebook], and is it going to be enjoyable?” Karwowski said. “Am I going to want to stay there and consume more and more content?”
So far, users seem to be saying that they do. During the company’s September earnings call, Zuckerberg told investors that feed and video recommendations powered by AI increased time spent on Facebook by 8% and Instagram by 6%.
Creator Thoren Bradley acknowledged that Facebook and Instagram can work for some small businesses and creators, but he told us that he fears a world where Meta lacks real competition. He views Facebook as trying to feel like the “golf course of social media,” a place to sell ads and connect with elder millennials up through boomers.
“Facebook’s become like a utility,” digital ad strategist Jon Loomer said. “Is it cool? Absolutely not. Is it still the biggest social media platform right now? Yeah.”
Recently, Zuckerberg criticized Apple for not “really [inventing] anything great in a while.” It was a pot-meet-kettle situation, and people online questioned what, exactly, Meta had invented lately and noted that its MO for a long time has been acquiring apps like it did with Instagram and WhatsApp, or creating its own versions of popular apps, like its Snapchat-like Stories and TikTok-like Reels features, or even creating a text-based platform similar to X with Threads.
As Facebook considers its future, it seems likely that it will continue to follow what’s trending, whether in the form of new features, apps, or Zuckerberg’s personal chain collection. In January, Instagram announced it would soon release a video-editing app called Edits that sounds pretty similar to the ByteDance app CapCut.
“I think these apps are great with what they originally set out to do,” Mitchell said. “Then, they start to try and do too much, and that’s when it becomes less fun for everyone involved, whether you’re a creator or a consumer. You can feel that shift, and it doesn’t work, eventually.”
This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.
