Stories is the one that comes to mind for me. Another product that was shamelessly replicated from a competitor, but refined under FB, and now represents a meaningful proportion of the platform's ad revenue.
And I know you specified launches in the last couple years, but just doing some back of the envelope math, some 60 percent of the world population where Meta isn't banned are MAUs across their family of apps -- hard to argue against their broad consumer adoption generally.
If stories (which launched, surprisingly, in 2016) and reels are the only wins we can point to in all of Meta’s platforms for this experience-first-monetization-later approach, can we really say it’s a proven success?
Given what’s happened to the Facebook user base in the past ~five years, it feels like Instagram and WhatsApp are still thriving despite Meta’s strategy, not because of it.
Is this actually true, though?
Aside from reels on IG, I’m struggling to think of anything that Meta has successfully launched to broad consumer adoption in the last few years.