But the moves also appear to be strongly prompted by business considerations. The company has grown from a single social network — Facebook — to what Zuckerberg refers to as a “family” of four apps, with Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook was long the star, but last year WhatsApp surpassed it in the number of people who use it on a monthly basis, according to industry reports. Zuckerberg recently began emphasizing the number of people who use at least one of its products once a month — 2.7 billion people — rather than the 2.3 billion monthly users for Facebook alone. Users log onto messaging apps more frequently than the core social network, whose growth has flattened in the United States and Europe.

Source: Los Angeles Times March 06, 2019 20:01 UTC