Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica nightmare — in which a UK data firm allegedly leaked ill-gotten info about millions of Facebook users — may have rocked the company, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the company’s bottom line. In fact, if you were solely looking at the company’s latest earnings, you might actually think the scandal has helped Facebook.
The company posted earnings of $11.97 billion for the first quarter of 2018, beating Wall Street’s expectations of $11.41 billion and proving that advertisers have not been deterred by the social network’s spate of headline-making issues.
“Despite facing important challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a prepared statement during the company’s earnings call.
Echoing his testimony on Capitol Hill earlier in April, Zuckerberg noted that Facebook has “a responsibility to keep the community safe,” and acknowledged that the company hasn’t been doing enough to prevent Facebook’s tools from being hijacked.
But, “we also have a responsibility to keep moving forward,” he said. And, on that front, Facebook is more dominant than ever. Besides increasing revenue a staggering 50 percent from last year, user growth is up 13 percent, with Facebook reporting 2.2 billion billion monthly active users. (So much for #DeleteFacebook, a hashtag movement that emerged in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, accomplishing much of anything.)
And, just in case anyone was concerned advertisers might be leaving Facebook over ongoing concerns, COO Sheryl Sandberg confirmed that the company hadn’t observed a “meaningful trend” of advertisers departing.
Oh, and what about recent speculation that Facebook may move away from an ad-supported model in favor of a subscription service? Don’t hold your breath. Zuckerberg appeared to back away from the idea after previous statements that many read as potentially supportive.
“Ads is a great business model that’s aligned with our mission… this is something that we at Facebook are very proud of, and we think it’s the right way to build a service,” he said.
Facebook stock was up more than 7 percent in after-hours trading following earnings.