Foreign media: Facebook said on Wednesday that its first-quarter revenue, driven mostly by ad spending, rose 49 percent to $12 billion. Net profit rose 65 percent year-on-year to a record $4.9 billion.
The number of daily logins in March rose 3.4 percent from the previous quarter, even though many users said they deleted Facebook after a privacy scandal in mid-March. It is possible that other consequences of the missing impact will be more pronounced in the second quarter.
"Despite significant challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
Facebook is at the most dangerous moment in its 14-year history. The social network is reining in the fallout from a data privacy scandal, where lax policies have allowed Trump-affiliated consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to inappropriately bribe up to 87 million Facebook users for their private information. Facebook is facing multiple class-action lawsuits and an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over its practices.
Shares have fallen 14% since the controversy erupted. But strong quarterly growth sent shares up more than 7% in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
"It's probably the most significant benefit they've gotten," said Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer and head of technology research at research firm GBHInsights. "Given the consumer anger after Cambridge Analytica, there's been tremendous pressure to show that their advertising model hasn't been affected by the past few years." Moon black clouds have a significant impact. "
Due to the Cambridge Analytica controversy, the company did not discuss whether it would lose users. COO Sheryl Sandberg said several advertisers stopped spending on Facebook in the weeks following the disclosure, and one advertiser had returned to the platform.
The biggest impact of this turbulent period is visible in Facebook's fees and costs. Executives expect spending to surge in the coming year as the company continues to hire more employees. Expenses have jumped 39% thanks to a record number of new hires.
The company is also in the midst of an expensive hiring spree as it beefs up security to tackle disinformation and other forms of platform manipulation. The company plans to hire about 10,000 additional staff, including content managers around the world, to bolster the effort.
A recent study by the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-Public Affairs Research Center found that 12 percent trust Facebook as a news source. Another survey by Axios and SurveyMonkey found that Facebook's favorability rating has fallen by 28 percentage points over the past five months - more than double that of rivals Amazon and Google.
Last quarter, Zuckerberg announced a surprising new metric -- people are spending less and less time on Facebook each day -- the result of the company's push to emphasize the quality of interactions on its platform over the popularity of content. The changes also caused growth to stall in some places, including a small drop in the number of users in the U.S.
However, the platform's overall growth is slowing. There was a slight decline in North American users last quarter compared to the previous quarter. The company added 3 million subscribers to 185 million in the U.S. and Canada between the first quarter of 2018 and the same quarter last year. However, between 2016 and 2017, growth was stronger, with the company adding 9 million North American subscribers.
Some of those losses could eventually be replaced by Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp, whose user growth continues to pick up, but those platforms don't bring in Facebook's revenue.
Facebook is adapting to sweeping new privacy laws in Europe, giving citizens more say in how their data is used. The law slams tech companies for breaking the rules, with fines of up to 4 percent of global profits. Facebook is devoting resources to preparing for these changes.
Facebook executives faced many questions from analysts about the impact of European privacy rules. They expect European user growth to level off or even decline in the coming year due to the new law, but it won't have a major impact on revenue. (Source: Hacker Weekly)