Facebook has just announced its quarterly earnings for the fourth quarter and its year-end results for 2018. It was able to beat analysts expectations on both the top and bottom lines. Which has Facebook’s stock up seven-percent in after-hours trading.
For revenue, Facebook grew 37-percent in 2018 versus 2017. While is only grew 30-percent in the quarter compared to the year ago period. Facebook raked in $55 billion for the year, compared to $40.6 billion in 2017. For the quarter, those numbers are $16.9 billion compared to $12.9 billion a year ago.
Now where things really matter for Facebook is in its active users. Daily Active Users or DAUs, were 1.52 billion on average for December, which is a nine-percent increase year-over-year. Monthly Active Users or MAUs were 2.32 billion as of December 31. That is also a nine-percent increase year-over-year. These increases come despite the numerous privacy issues that Facebook faced in 2018, and numerous #DeleteFacebook campaigns out there.
The company also notes that it estimates around 2.7 billion people use Facebook’s apps each month. This includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Facebook also estimates that over two billion people use at least one of its services every day, on average. Facebook did not break down users per service, unfortunately. But WhatsApp is likely the second biggest to Facebook’s core app.
When it comes to advertising revenue, about 93-percent came from mobile, and that is also up from 89-percent a year ago. Capital expenditures or CapEx, was $4.37 billion and $13.92 in the quarter and for the full year.
Facebook, as of December 31, 2018, has 35,587 employees. That is an increase of 42-percent year-over-year.
Interestingly enough, the company did not mention Stories at all in its press release today. That’s a feature that it has been pushing across all of its apps in recent months. It is also a bigger driver of traffic and ad revenue than any other feature that it has. Therefore it is pretty important to the company. With Facebook not mentioning it, this could mean that the company saw a dip in users, but that is unlikely. It is likely that we will hear about it on the earnings call a bit later.
Facebook’s CEO, CFO and other executives will be on its earnings call shortly. Where things are expected to get pretty heated, given recent developments at Facebook. With the news last week that the company wants to merge Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Compounded with the news that broke last night, that it was exploiting Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program to collect data from teenagers in exchange for about $20 per month. Apple has since shut down their Enterprise account, making all of its internal apps useless.
It’s interesting that despite the fact that we know Facebook does not care about our data, that it is still growing. It is not seeing a mass exodus, and in fact it is seeing a relatively decent growth rate. Especially for a company that is already very large. This just shows everyone that their data just isn’t as important to most people as it truly should be.