Meta's monopoly expansion with threads and the impact on communication

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In 2021, everything that, until then, we knew as a product of Facebook Inc., became part of a conglomerate called Meta Platforms Inc., with CEO Mark Zuckerberg making the big announcement, along with the announcement of the infamous (and somewhat controversial) Metaverse .

From that point on, it became clear that Mark had a greater desire to no longer work with just one part of the technology and social media market, but to start giving a name to a monopoly that has been in the making for a long time and year after year, and inserting it into the daily lives of individuals and companies, making it impossible not to get involved in it.

Does Mark Zuckerberg want to dominate the market?
Photo: Disclosure/Meta/Canaltech
It is no longer news that Mark Zuckerberg has a desire to create a dominance of the global social media and digital advertising market , making it impossible to turn up your nose or refuse to be a part of it.

To give you an idea, data revealed in February 2023 by Meta itself showed that Instagram alone reached the mark of 2 billion daily active users, worldwide, on the platform. US$40 billion in annual ad sales are expected in 2023.

To give you an idea, in Brazil alone, the social network canada whatsapp data has more than 113.5 million users, which represents an incredible 53.70% of the country's 211 million inhabitants. In other words, more than half of the people in the entire country have an Instagram account and use the platform. And we're only talking about Instagram , which is just one of the brands belonging to Meta.

Mark's movements in recent years
In the early 2010s, Facebook was already the largest social network in the world , with over 500 million users and an estimated value of around US$104 billion. At this point, Mark realized that he would need to start making the moves and acquisitions that would start his monopoly, diversifying his operations and allowing him to generate several sources of income.

In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion . At the time, it was just a hyped social network with a primary focus on photo production. Over time, the social network grew considerably and acquired several highly acclaimed features and functions.

Two years later, in 2014, it was WhatsApp's turn to be purchased by Facebook . The instant messaging app was acquired for approximately 22 billion dollars at the time.

It didn't stop there, because in the same year another giant step came: Facebook made another large acquisition, acquiring the company Oculus, creator of several virtual reality devices. The acquisition was worth around $2.2 billion and elevated Facebook in the technology and virtual reality market, generating a lot of controversy about the monopoly that was clearly being built.

Back in 2013, Zuckerberg's company tried to buy Snapchat, a social network for temporary messages, for approximately 3 billion dollars. The acquisition of Snapchat, however, did not materialize . This gave way to the creation of Instagram Stories in 2016, which was extremely successful and caused a large exodus of Snapchat users, considerably decreasing its popularity.

In addition to stories, another feature added was IGTV. The idea was to compete with YouTube by creating a feature within Instagram that had similar dynamics, but that kept the user engaged on Instagram.

Over time, the IGTV function was discontinued and made way for reels in 2020 as a way to try to compete with TikTok, so every video that is posted on Instagram today becomes Reels content, whether it is short or not.

News and more news on WhatsApp and Instagram
Do you really think that the news is over? Instagram and WhatsApp, for example, continue to receive new features that make them increasingly indispensable and necessary, especially for companies that need an efficient communication ecosystem.