Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased a “return to OG Facebook” as part of his key goals for 2025 in Wednesday’s Q4 earnings call with investors. While the company was short on details as to what specific changes lay in store, it’s clear that Meta is in desperate need of younger Facebook users to sustain itself for the next generation.
Asked about his plans for the “OG Facebook,” Zuckerberg replied that it was one of Meta’s focus areas for the year ahead and something the company planned to both invest in and spend time on.
“I think there are a lot of opportunities to make [Facebook] way more culturally influential than it is today,” he noted.
The exec also warned investors that these changes to Facebook may require some tradeoffs in terms of “maximizing business results in the near term” — a signal that revenues could be affected. He said the product changes would begin to roll out within half a year or so.
“I think some of this will kind of get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day,” Zuckerberg said, while tight-lipped on any other details.
Declining interest in Facebook among young people is becoming a problem for the tech giant, especially as its core adult users continue to age.
According to a study by eMarketer released last August, U.S. Gen Z users ages 18 to 24 spend far more time on TikTok, followed by Instagram and Snapchat — twice as much time, in fact, compared with the total U.S. adult population. Meanwhile, a 2024 survey by Pew Research found that U.S. teens’ (13-17) use of Facebook had dropped sharply over the years from 71% in 2014-2015 to just 33%.
Often, what appeals to Gen Z isn’t even the social networking aspects of Facebook; it’s the more utilitarian features like Facebook Marketplace.
Meta has long been aware of these challenges, having launched a Gen Z-focused redesign of its aging social network in October 2024, promising greater emphasis on local community information, videos, and Facebook Groups, among other things.
The company now aims to build on those changes with a further refresh of the Facebook product in 2025, though its ability to compete with Gen Z’s preferred app, TikTok, remains uncertain.
What’s more, Gen Z users have sent a strong signal that they’re ready to move on from Meta, if TikTok were to remain banned in the U.S. Instead of returning to Meta’s platform, young people downloaded RedNote, another Chinese app similar to TikTok, ahead of and during the briefly enforced U.S. TikTok ban.
It may be difficult, if not impossible, for Facebook to ever-again attract younger users by returning to its “OG” roots. The company had already tried to reignite its original feeling of exclusivity by launching a side of Facebook called Campus in 2020 that only catered to college and university students. That effort was shuttered a year and a half later after failing to take off.
Meta has also dabbled in using other services, like online dating, to lure in new users with little success.
Meanwhile, new social networks are being built on the open social web, powered by protocols like ActivityPub, used by Mastodon, and AT Protocol, used by Bluesky, allowing people to take back control over their data and social connections from the centralized, billionaire-controlled platforms owned by Big Tech. As these networks, grow, they’ll become competition for efforts like an “OG Facebook.”
Meta has been working to shield investors from Facebook’s decline for years.
In Q4 2019, Meta (then called Facebook) introduced new stats for investors called family daily active people and family monthly active people. Later, in Q1 2024, Meta took steps to distance itself from per-app metrics by eliminating daily active and monthly active users in its quarterly reports in favor of its family of apps’ metrics.
In its filing at the time, Meta said the decision was meant to better showcase how many people engaged with all of its products, not just Facebook and Messenger. In all likelihood, it served another purpose, too: to hide Facebook’s decline within Meta’s larger “family” group of apps.
