Mary Meeker Report Highlights Facebook, Twitter Growth Slowing

Here’s an obvious reason Facebook and Twitter are always working so hard to add new users — the money they’re making off the users they do have is climbing, but quickly slowing down.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker unveiled her annual State of the Internet report Wednesday at Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Among the findings was a slide highlighting a troubling trend for both social networks. “Average revenue per user” growth, or ARPU as the metric is called on Wall Street, has been steadily declining for both companies over the past year.

In other words, Facebook and Twitter are adding new users, but revenue growth isn’t keeping up at the same rate.

Of course, one part of the issue may be that many of the new users joining both networks are coming from emerging markets, where digital advertising is nowhere near as mature as it is in the United States. So the companies are adding new users without the kind of revenue stream they get in more established markets.

Here’s a look at the trend from Meeker’s report:

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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