Demographic disaster, Monetization of Social, and Best-of-breed SaaS

Today’s Topics

Hello, today we have 3 charts for you exploring:

• Demographic Disaster: Falling working age population in large economies

• Monetization of Social Media: Meta’s lead over others

• Zoom vs. Microsoft: Will Microsoft Teams slow down Zoom?

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In economics, we have a term called “Demographic Dividend” which happens when a country’s economy benefits from having a large, growing working age population.

When the opposite happens, it turns into a disaster.

If the working age population declines, there may not be enough people to work and support the rest of the population (e.g. children, elderly), reducing economic output and quality of life.

According to UN’s Medium Population Forecast Scenario, three of the top 5 economies in the world - China, Germany and Japan, are set to face a rapid decline in working age population.

This is one of the most serious treats to world economy and for specifically these countries.

While Germany and Japan have been struggling with low fertility rates for decades, China’s population decline is thanks to its controversial One-Child policy, implemented in 1980.

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Across its family of apps (mainly Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp), Meta has the most number of social media users in the world - $3.65B monthly active users

It also makes the most revenue per user.

Meta makes ~$7.9 in revenue per user every quarter, compared to $5 by Twitter, the next highest

Frankly, I was surprised to find that Twitter is #2 in terms of monetization as its often seen to be poorly monetized by industry watchers.

Pinterest and TikTok are least monetized of the lot. TikTok, however, is still early in its monetization journey and is a key competitor to Meta.

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SaaS companies (like Zoom, Slack) often worry if Microsoft will kill their growth by copying their product and giving it away - often in cheaper bundles, to its enormous installed base of enterprise customers.

Well, data from Okta’s business at Work report, should give them a cheer.

Acc. to the report, companies prefer to use best-of-breed tools (e.g. Zoom for Video Conferencing) and are not necessarily loyal to buying all their software from one vendor.

This is supported by data, as we see that even after Teams was launched in 2017, companies who were using Microsoft 365 (which comes bundled with Teams), kept on deploying Zoom in increasing numbers after 2017

While Slack’s penetration slowed down considerably, Zoom’s share kept increasing and only slowed a bit in 2021.

This should give hope to SaaS founders who are worried about Microsoft’s distribution power - a good product can still win in the market.

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More data bites

1. Is Airbnb Safe? An extensive analysis on 127,813 guest complaints

2. H1B Salary data: A website to see salaries for H-1B visa jobs in US

3. Europe’s decline: 2 simple charts to show Europe’s declining economic power

4. A new Pew Survey found that 95% of US teens use YouTube and 67% use TikTok

5. Visualization of Housing market data and trends, by Redfin

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