Facebook and Instagram users’ “most important reason” for using the apps is to keep up with friends and family, according to a June 2023 consumer survey conducted by a US Federal Trade Commission expert who testified today in antitrust litigation seeking to break up Meta Platforms.
Facebook and Instagram users’ “most important reason” for using the apps is to keep up with friends and family, according to a June 2023 consumer survey conducted by a US Federal Trade Commission expert who testified today in antitrust litigation seeking to break up Meta Platforms.According to a survey of approximately 3,500 US adults conducted by FTC expert Michal Malkiewicz examining consumers' usage of and attitudes toward Meta’s products and other online services, no other service came close to eliciting a similar response besides Snapchat, which was virtually tied between friends and family sharing and private communication for its most important use case.
Will Cathcart, Meta’s current head of WhatsApp and the former lead product manager for the Facebook app, faced questions today about internal documents that backed Malkiewicz’s survey results.
Facebook is “the one place where people connect with everyone they know in their life,” and its development of additional features is “built on top of the unique connections” people have on the app, according to internal communications among company executives in December 2018.
The time users spend online and the reasons for spending time on different digital platforms is at the heart of FTC monopolization litigation seeking to break off WhatsApp and Instagram from Meta Platforms (see here).
A debate was unfolding within the company around 2018 about whether Facebook should stop focusing on its main use case — friends and family sharing — Cathcart testified today.
Pivoting from Facebook’s “main thing” would disappoint the platform's current users, Cathcart said in an e-mail to senior company product executive Chris Cox in June 2018.
But the company also faced potential risks from what Cathcart described to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg as a “bake-off” between apps competing within the company’s growing family of apps.
— Survey results —
“What is the most important reason why you use Facebook?” was among the survey questions posed to Malkiewicz’s target population of US adults who were users of Meta’s services and had used those services within 12 months of his survey.
“To keep up with my friends’ and family’s lives in one place” was the response provided by 60 percent of respondents, with entertainment and news coming in second and third, respectively, at below 10 percent.
Friends and family connectivity also topped the charts for Instagram and Snapchat. Both came in around 30 percent, although Malkiewicz noted a “statistical tie” in Snapchat’s case.
The survey also included questions about the most important and second-most important reasons behind users’ engagement with services like YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit and Nextdoor.
None of those services came in above 5 percent when it came to friends and family sharing being most important to users.
Other questions included in the survey also teased out a distinction between the public sharing aspect of Facebook and Instagram as opposed to the private sharing aspect of texting services like SMS, iMessage and WhatsApp.
Private communication was the most important reason for using those messaging services, with friends and family sharing consistently ranking second for about 25 percent of respondents.
Malkiewicz also presented US District Judge James Boasberg with a sampling of academic research, internal business documents and consumer surveys from Meta and other digital market players, and public research conducted over the last 15 years that the FTC expert claimed were “directionally and qualitatively” aligned with the results of his own survey.
During cross-examination, Meta’s counsel questioned the FTC expert about his decision to exclude teens from the survey and introduced an internal survey conducted by Meta in 2020 that was not cited in Malkiewicz’s expert reports.
The company’s effort to cast doubt on Malkiewicz’s conclusions backfired, however, after the FTC brought up the same document during redirect.
The number one “key takeaway” from the same study found that both Facebook and Instagram’s feeds were primarily about maintaining relationships and self-expression given the apps’ “friends and family nature.”
None of the top five “jobs to be done” by Twitter or TikTok regarding sharing online had anything to do with maintaining relationships, according to survey responses included in the document.
— WhatsApp —
Cathcart was also questioned about WhatsApp, which he began overseeing in 2019.
Earlier in his testimony, Boasberg had an extended exchange with Cathcart about the mechanics of group messaging on WhatsApp and how it compared to Apple’s iMessage.
“What’s the use case for that?” Boasberg asked after Cathcart told the judge people were “absolutely” sending messages to group chats that included over 100 people.
At one point later in the proceedings, Boasberg repeated the same question to Cathcart at least three times: how does Meta calculate the allocation of ad revenue to WhatsApp from advertisements hosted on Facebook and Instagram?
Those ads, when clicked, send users to a WhatsApp conversation with a business.
Because Meta has been focused on growing WhatsApp and was confident it could eventually make money from its large user pool, “we end up not worrying a ton about it,” Cathcart told Boasberg.
Meta’s valuation figures justifying the company’s $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp and slow progress on monetizing the app’s user pool had been points of contention earlier in the trial (see here).
During redirect, FTC counsel presented Cathcart with an almost completely redacted table showing so-called “Click to WhatsApp” ad revenue figures from 2023 and 2024, as well as projections for 2025 and 2026.
Cathcart testified that he was “not sure” whether WhatsApp’s share of those revenues could have declined over time based on the data in the chart.
The WhatsApp head also said he didn’t think it was true that Meta’s practice prior to 2023 was not to allocate those revenues to WhatsApp.
Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer and head of analytics, also testified briefly before the end of proceedings today. His testimony is scheduled to continue tomorrow.
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