After a quarter filled with negative headlines, Facebook reported lower-than-expected growth in revenue and daily active users in its second quarter earnings release.
Facebook reported $13.23 billion in revenue between April and June 2018. A Thompson Reuters consensus estimate predicted the company would generate $13.36 billion in revenue. Facebook’s net income was $5.1 billion, up from nearly $5 billion last quarter.
The company reported 2.23 billion monthly active users at the end of Q2 and 1.47 billion daily active users — an 11 percent increase year-over-year, but some Wall Street analysts predicted the company would report roughly 2.25 billion MAUs and 1.48 DAUs this quarter.
As an example of just how much Facebook’s growth slowed this quarter, the number of MAUs grew by 1.54 percent between Q1 and Q2 2018, compared to 3.14 percent between Q1 2018 and Q4 2017.
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On its earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company was releasing a new stat for the first time: how many people use at least one of Facebook’s app every month, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. That number is 2.5 billion.
Facebook gave advertisers and analysts plenty of reasons to worry this quarter — with Congress threatening to regulate Facebook, the rollout of tighter restrictions on political and issue ads that frustrated some advertisers, the company continuing to face criticism over its handling of fake news on Facebook and WhatsApp, and the fallout of Facebook failing to stop Cambridge Analytica from violating its data policies still fresh in consumers’ minds.
Facebook lost 3 million daily active users in Europe this quarter, and 1 million monthly active users. In May, Europe began implementing GDPR, its new set of data privacy laws. Facebook CFO Dave Wehner cited GDPR as the cause of the decline of both DAUs and MAUs in Europe, “consistent with the outlook we gave on the Q1 call.” The number of both DAUs and MAUs in the U.S. and Canada remained stagnant.
