Facebook said it's seen an increase in usage of its services during the coronavirus crisis, especially in hard-hit countries such as Italy. However, the increase is mainly in messaging, a service it does not monetise, while ad revenues on the social network have softened due to the slowdown in economic activity.
In many of the countries affected by the virus, total messaging has increased more than 50 percent over the last month, Facebook said. Voice and video calling have more than doubled on Messenger and WhatsApp in these countries.
For example in Italy, Facebook said users have spent up to 70 percent more time across its apps since the crisis arrived in the country. Instagram and Facebook Live views also doubled in a week. Messaging there increased over 50 percent and time in group calling (calls with three or more participants) increased by over 1,000 percent during the past month.
Much of the increased traffic is happening on the messaging services, but Facebook said it's also seen more people using its feed and stories products to get updates. At the same time, "our business is being adversely affected like so many others around the world", Facebook said. As it doesn't monetise many of the services where it's seeing increased engagement, the company said it's "seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of Covid-19".
In a statement, the company also confirmed it's temporarily reducing bit rates for videos on Facebook and Instagram in certain regions in order to alleviate network congestion. Facebook said it's services were built to withstand spikes in usage and in order to manage the "unprecedented" usage growth during the Covid-19 pandemic, it will continue to work on preparing its infrastructure for spikes in traffic.
