Headcount is up (48 percent), daily active users are up (13 percent, to 1.45 billion) and Facebook’s advertising revenue is up a stunning 50 percent.
If Facebook has seen increasingly seen the word “troubled” used in editorial about the company, amid a data sharing scandal, its results showed little sign that users or advertisings are abandoning the platform.
The company returned nearly $5 billion in net income for the quarter, up 62.8 percent from a year earlier and Facebook sold $11.8 billion in ads during Q1.
The chart below shows a “small hiccup” in advertising spending after the day the Cambridge Analytica story broke, but a return to “business as usual” a few days after.
Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of Socialbakers, the AI-powered social media marketing platform, told Computer Business Review: “We see no trend that brands are moving away from investing their ad dollars in the Facebook platform.”
He added: “Social performance data shows that Instagram is the most powerful platform for brands. With some uncertainty around Facebook’s future earnings, Instagram’s importance this quarter and in the future cannot be underestimated. All in all, there is a big gap between media reporting on the #DeleteFacebook movement and reality when it comes to brands, who seem to be as active as ever.”
Data shows Facebook’s cost-per click meanwhile has remained pretty stable. There was a slight uptick when Facebook announced the algorithm change in January and mature regions like the US and UK have been impacted hardest.
“Despite facing important challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018,” Zuckerberg said in the earnings announcement. “We are taking a broader view of our responsibility and investing to make sure our services are used for good. But we also need to keep building new tools to help people connect, strengthen our communities, and bring the world closer together.”
