NEW YORK, March 13 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Mark Zuckerberg is eyeing Elon Musk’s turf. Meta Platforms (META.O) is exploring a stand-alone social network for sharing text updates, according to a statement from the social media network to Breakingviews on Monday. The move makes sense since Facebook and Instagram have done a better job wringing money from their users than Twitter has. Now that the platform owned by Musk is going through severe challenges, it is an even easier land grab.
Since Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, the network has been plagued by technical difficulties and fleeing advertisers. And even during the best of times, Twitter was playing third string to Facebook and Instagram. In the year before it went private, it burned $370 million of cash. Meanwhile in 2021 Meta raked in $38 billion.
Meta’s cash flow has since fallen, but it’s possible that the two companies have diverged even more. Zuckerberg has a business model that knows how to monetize users, whereas Twitter is still figuring that out. In 2021, each one of Meta’s nearly 3 billion daily active users represented over $40 in revenue compared to $16 per Twitter user. Zuckerberg’s Twitter competitor may be in its early stages, but it already has a head start. (By Jennifer Saba)
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