Facebook Earnings
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Facebook hits 2.5B users in Q4 but shares sink from slow profits
Facebook beat Wall Street estimates in Q4 but slowing profit growth beat up the share price. Facebook reached 2.5 billion monthly users, up 2%, from 2.45 billion in Q3 2019 when it grew 1.65%, and it now has 1.66 billion daily active users, up 2.4% from 1.62 billion last quarter when it grew 2%. Facebook brought in $21.08 billion in revenue, up 25% year-over-year, with $2.56 in earnings per share.
But net income was just $7.3 billion, up only 7% year-over-year compared to 61% growth over 2018. Meanwhile, operating margins fell from 45% over 2018 to 34% for 2019. Expenses grew to $12.2 billion for Q4 2019, up a whopping 34% from Q4 2018. For the year, Facebook’s $46 billion in expenses are up 51% vs 2018. One big source of those expenses? Headcount grew 26% year-over-year to 44,942, and Facebook now has over 1000 engineers working on privacy.
While Facebook’s user base keeps growing rather steadily, it’s having trouble squeezing more and more cash out of them with as much efficiency.
Facebook’s Q4 2019 earnings beat expectations compared to Zack’s consensus estimates of $20.87 billion in revenue and $2.51 earnings per share. Facebook shares fell over 7% in after-hours trading following the earnings announcement after closing up 2.5% at a peak $223.23 today. Still, Facebook remains near its previous share price high before this month.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously warned that addressing hate speech, election interference, and other content moderation and safety issues would be costly. Still, expenses grew and profits shrunk faster than Wall Street seems to have expected. Facebook will have to hope its promise of using scalable AI to handle more of these jobs comes to fruition soon.
But some might see today as the proper reckoning for Facebook — penance for years of neglecting safety in favor of growth. Facebook’s CFO David Wehner confirms it has also just agreed to pay $550 million in a settlement over its violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The class action suit stems from Facebook collecting users’ facial recognition data to power its Tag Suggestions feature that recommends friends tag you in photos in which you appear. The record-breaking settlement still falls far short of the $35 billion in potential penalties Facebook could have received.
Facebook’s executives are apparently bullish on its value despite the share price being at a peak, as today Facebook announced plans to grow its share-repurchase program by $10 billion, adding to its previous authorization of buying back up to $24 billion worth.
Facebook managed to add 1 million daily users in the U.S. & Canada region where it earns the most money after returning to growth there last quarter following a year of slow or no growth. Facebook’s stickiness, or daily to monthly active user ratio remained at 66% amidst competition from apps like TikTok and a resurgent Snapchat.
Masking The Shift To Instagram
Facebook notes that there are now 2.26 billion users that open either Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp each day, up from 2.2 billion last quarter. The family of apps sees 2.89 billion total monthly users, up 9% year-over-year.
Facebook released a new stat with this earnings report: Family Average Revenue Per Person. That’s essentially the company’s total revenue divided by total users on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Clearly, the company is trying to use Instagram’s growing ad revenue to make the rest of the company look stronger. This might help mask changes in the Facebook app’s own revenue as teens look to more youthful content feeds. Wehner confirmed the company will cease sharing Facebook-only stats in favor of Family Of Apps stats in late 2020.
Sadly Facebook’s isn’t calling this metric FARPP
Earnings Call Highlights
Zuckerberg stressed Facebook’s need to stay focused on addressing social issues and consequences of the company’s growth during the earnings call. He said Facebook will continue to make its apps more private and secure.
As for product updates, Zuckerberg seized on opportunities in commerce. Facebook is building out WhatsApp Pay, and he says “I expect this to start rolling out in a number of countries and for us to make a lot of progress here in the next six months.” 140 million small businesses now use its tools. People bought almost $5 million in content on the Oculus Store on Christmas Day, which Zuckerberg called a milestone. He says Facebook’s Spark AR platform is most used of its kind by developers, with hundreds of millions of people experiencing face filters built with it.
Regarding plans to integrate the family’s chat interfaces, Zuckerberg says Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp will retain their brands. He also noted they’re already quite integrated on the backend…which could be an attempt to persuade regulators it might be difficult to break up the company.
For guidance, Wehner said “we expect our year-over-year total reported revenue growth rate in Q1 to decelerate by low-to-mid single digit percentage points as compared to our Q4 growth rate. “Factors driving this deceleration include the maturity of our business, as well as the increasing impact from global privacy regulation and other ad targeting related headwinds.”
Wehner says to expect that the worst of these privacy headwinds are still to come due to regulatory initiatives like GDPR and CCPA, mobile operating systems and browser providers like Apple and Google limiting access to ad targeting singals, and Facebook’s own product changes like the new way to disconnect off-Facebook data from your acccount.
On Facebook’s perception issues, Zuckerberg said “We’re also focused on communicating more clearly what we stand for. One critique of our approach for much of the last decade was that, because we wanted to be liked, we didn’t always communicate our views as clearly because we were worried about offending people. So this led to some positive but shallow sentiments towards us and towards the company. And my goal for this next decade isn’t to be liked, but to be understood, because in order to be trusted, people need to know what you stand for.”
Building Despite Scrutiny
The business aside, Facebook had another tough quarter under the scrutiny of journalists and regulators. Democratic presidential candidates have railed against Zuckerberg’s decision to continuing allowing misinformation in political ads. The company dropped out of the top 10 places to work, and pledged $130 million to fund an Oversight Board for its content policies.
The CEO was grilled on Capitol Hill about Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra that seems stuck in its tracks as major partners like Visa and Stripe dropped out. Facebook took heat for how its treats content moderators and how it tried to cut off competitors from its developer platform. The FTC continued its anti-trust investigation and weighed an injunction that would halt Facebook intermingling its messaging app infrastructure.
But those headwinds didn’t stop Facebook’s march forward. Its four main apps took the top four spots amongst the most downloaded apps of the 2010s. It moved deeper into hardware sales with its new Portal TV attachable camera. It acquired gaming companies like Playgiga and the studio behind VR hit Beat Saber, while signing exclusive game streaming deals with influencers like Disguised Toast. It launched Facebook News, Facebook Pay, its dating feature in the US, and it tested a meme-making app called Whale.
Facebook’s share price remains near an all-time high despite today’s tumble. While the world may be increasingly uncomfortable with Facebook’s access to private data, there’s no debate about how incredibly valuable that data is.
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You might hate it, but Facebook Stories now has 500M users
You might think it’s redundant with Instagram Stories, or just don’t want to see high school friends’ boring lives, but ephemeral Snapchat-style Stories now have 500 million daily users across Facebook and Messenger. WhatsApp’s Stories feature Status has 500 million dailies too, and Instagram hit that milestone three months ago. That’s impressive, because it means one-third of Facebook’s 1.56 billion daily users are posting or watching Stories each day, up from zero when Facebook launched the feature two years ago.
For reference, Stories inventor Snapchat has just 190 million total daily users.
Facebook Stories
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new stats on today’s Facebook Q1 2019 earnings call, which showed it’s user growth rate had increased but it had to save $3 billion for a potential FTC fine over privacy practices.
Facebook isn’t just using Stories to keep people engaged, but to squeeze more cash out of them. Today COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that 3 million advertisers have now bought Stories ads across Facebook’s family of apps. I’d expect Facebook to launch a Stories Ad Network soon so other apps can show Facebook’s vertical video ads and get a cut of the revenue.
Facebook’s aggressive move to clone Snapchat Stories not just in Instagram but everywhere might have pissed users off at first, but many of them have come around. If you give people a place to put their face at the top of their friends’ phones, they’ll fill it. And if someone dangles a window into the lives of people you know and people you wish you did, you’ll open that window regularly.
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Facebook reserves $3B for FTC fine, but keeps growing with 2.38B users in Q1
A massive penalty hangs over Facebook’s head, but it otherwise had a very strong Q1 earnings report. Facebook reached 2.38 billion monthly users, up 2.5 percent from 2.32 billion in Q4 2018 when it grew 2.2 percent, and it now has 1.56 billion daily active users, up 2.63 percent from 1.52 billion last quarter when it grew 2 percent. Facebook pulled in $15.08 in revenue, up 26 percent year-over-year compared to Refinitiv’s consensus estimates of $14.98 billion in revenue.
Facebook recorded earnings per share of $0.85 compared to estimates of $1.63 EPS. However, that’s because Facebook has set aside $3 billion to cover a potential FTC fine that it’s still resolving. Without that fine, it would have had an EPS of $1.89. Despite the set-aside, Facebook still earned $2.429 billion in profit, though that’s down from $4.988 a year ago and $6.8 billion in Q4 2018.
Facebook’s share price rose 8.3 percent to $197.84 after closing before earnings at $182.58, way up from its recent low of $124.06 in December. Wall Street seems to have already priced in the potential FTC fine. Facebook has agreed to strict oversight of how it handled user privacy in a 2011 deal with the FTC. It promised to not misrepresent its privacy practices or change privacy controls without user permission, and it’s now negotiating the fine for potentially breaking those terms.
Facebook wrote in its earnings release about the FTC fine that:
“In the first quarter of 2019, we reasonably estimated a probable loss and recorded an accrual of $3.0 billion in connection with the inquiry of the FTC into our platform and user data practices, which accrual is included in accrued expenses and other current liabilities on our condensed consolidated balance sheet. We estimate that the range of loss in this matter is $3.0 billion to $5.0 billion. The matter remains unresolved, and there can be no assurance as to the timing or the terms of any final outcome.”
It’s possible Facebook escapes with a lesser fine that would likely still dwarf Google’s $22.5 million penalty for violating an FTC privacy deal. But it also might have to drag down a future quarter of earnings if the fine ranges as high as $5 billion or larger. Though Facebook does have $45.2 billion in cash and securities on hand to pay that fine and make any necessary acquisitions. Facebook’s headcount grew 36% year-over-year to 37,773 as it staffs up its security team, but it still has a 22 percent operating margin.
Facebook has managed to hold on to its 66 percent daily to monthly user ratio, showing people aren’t necessarily using it less despite all the backlash. It added 39 million daily users, compared to Snapchat’s addition of 4 million in Q1. But Facebook failed to grow past its 186 million daily user count in the US & Canada where it got stuck last quarter, but at least it added 4 million in its lucrative Europe market, plus it had atypically large gains in Asia-Pacific and the Rest Of World regions. As for monetization, Facebook made modest gains in average revenue per user across markets compared to Q3 2018 (excluding the holiday-laden Q4). Europe did especially well, growing ARPU 8.2 percent.
Zooming out, Facebook now has over 2.7 billion total mothly users across its family of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the same as last quarter. 2.1 billion people use at least one of those apps daily, up from 2 billion last quarter. Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Status, and Facebook Stories on Facebook and Messenger combined each now have 500 million daily users. Facebook also now has 3 million advertisers buying Stories ads across its apps, so the ephemeral format will likely start to contribute meaningful revenue soon.
Color From The Earnings Call
In March, Zuckerberg announced plans for a massive privacy-centric overhaul of Facebook to turn it from just a townsquare into also a “living room”. That means unifying its messaging apps with a backend that supports end-to-end encryption, and promoting ephemerality in content sharing and communication. That could help deter calls for regulation, make Facebook harder to break up, and help it stay ahead of competitors like Snapchat, but will also be a massive product and engineering undertaking.
Today, Zuckerberg focused on providing more details to this plan to expand privacy, encryption, impermanence, safety, interoperability, and secure data storage. He stressed that given people traditionally spend more time communicating and consuming content privately than publicly, strengthening Facebook’s “living room” could boost its business. Zuckerberg noted that since Facebook already doesn’t use messaging content for ad targeting and recent content is more useful for its business, encryption and impermanence shouldn’t be a big risk either. Refusing to store data in countries with poor records of privacy could lead to Facebook being banned there, which Zuckerberg admitted is a major business threat, but one it’s grappled with over content policies for years.
In fact, impermanence is already earning money for Facebook. It said that Instagram Stories was the greatest contributor of additional ad impressions this quarter. And while the Facebook and Instagram feeds are already jammed full of ads with little room for more, Facebook says there’s still room to significantly increase Instagram Stories ad load.
Another highlight of the call was Zuckerberg’s discussion of Facebook’s payments strategy. He confirmed that Facebook plans to build out ways for people to pay merchants through its messaging apps. “So I think that what we’re going to end up seeing is building out payments, which is going to end up being something that we do country by country . . . The goal is to have something where you could do discovery through the broader townsquare-like platforms like Instagram and Facebook, and then you can complete the transactions and follow up with businesses individually and have an ongoing relationship through Messenger and WhatsApp.”
This is the first earnings report of a full quarter following Facebook’s worst-ever security breach in September that impacted 50 million users, shaking confidence in the social network’s privacy and security. It’s also the first full quarter in which Facebook sold its own branded hardware — its Portal video chat device that was well received by critics except for the fact that it was made by Facebook.
Yet the defining story continues to be Facebook’s struggle with claims that its user research and developer platform efforts endangered user privacy and steamrolled competitors in search of growth. That includes TechCrunch’s big scoop that Facebook was paying teens to snoop on their data with a VPN app, which eventually led Facebook to shut down its Onavo user surveillance apps. The fact that Facebook isn’t losing massive numbers of users after years of sustained scandals is a testament to how deeply it’s woven itself into people’s lives.
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Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings amidst a constant beat down in the press. Facebook hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 perecent from 2.27 billion last quarter, speeding up its growth rate. Facebook climbed to 1.52 billion daily active users from 1.49 billion last quarter for a 2 percent growth rate that dwarfed last quarter’s 1.36 percent.
Facebook earned $16.91 billion off all those users with a $2.38 GAAP earnings per share. Those numbers handily beat Wall Street’s expectations of $16.39 billion in revenue and $2.18 GAAP earnings per share, plus 2.32 billion monthly and 1.51 billion daily active users. Facebook’s daily to monthly user ratio, or stickiness, held firm at 66 percent where it’s stayed for years, showing those still on Facebook aren’t using it much less.
Facebook shares had closed today at $150.42 but shot up over 11 percent following the record revenue and profit announcements to hover around $167. A big 30 percent year-over-year boost in average revenue per user in North America fueled those gains. Yet that’s still down from $186 where it was a year ago and a peak of $217 in July.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg went beyond his usual intro to the earnings report where he assures investors things are going well and highlights new opportunities. This quarter he noted “We’ve fundamentally changed how we run our company to focus on the biggest social issues, and we’re investing more to build new and inspiring ways for people to connect.”
Squeezing Money From The Olds
Facebook managed to grow its DAU in both the critical US & Canada and Europe markets where it earns the most money after stagnation or shrinkage in previous quarters. The fact that Facebook is no longer dwindling it its most lucrative markets is surely contributing to its share price climb. Facebook’s monthly active user plateaued in North America but roared up in Europe. That was shored up by a reversal of last quarter’s decline in Rest Of World average revenue per user, which fell 4.7% in Q3 but bounced back with 16.5 percent growth in Q4.
Facebook raked in $6.8 billion in profit this quarter as it slowed down hiring and only grew headcount 5 percent from 33,606 to 35,587. It seems Facebook has gotten to a comfortable place with its security staff-up in the wake of election interference, fake news, and content moderation troubles. Its revenue is up 30 percent year-over-year while profits grew 61 percent, which is pretty remarkable for a 15-year old technology company.
Earnings Call
Facebook’s plan to concentrate on product innovation in 2019 after focusing on security in 2018 was the core of today’s earnings call. Zuckerberg laid out a product roadmap for more ephemerality and encryption, how unifying the infrastructure of Facebook’s messaging apps will better connect Marketplace to WhatsApp, Groups will become an organizing function for more of the Facebook experience, and shopping features will crop up across the family of apps. You can read Zuckerberg’s full opening statement here.
New stats included 500 million daily Instagram Stories users and 2 million advertisers on Stories. Zuckerberg said he was pleasantly surprised by Facebook Portal sales but didn’t give specifics. He revealed 2.7 billion people now use Facebook’s family of apps each month. However, CFO David Wehner warned the company would eventually stop sharing Facebook-only stats, presumably to mask the shift of younger users to its other apps. He also cautioned that due to the shift of users from feeds to Stories that Facebook has less experience monetizing, and targeting headwinds due to increased privacy scrutiny, Facebook predicts mid-single digit revenue growth rate reductions each quarter this year.
We just released our community update and quarterly results.We’ve fundamentally changed how we run our company to…
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, January 30, 2019
While the quarter went well, morale isn’t quite as rosy. It’s been a brutal quarter for Facebook At least its swifter user growth rates show Facebook survived its biggest ever data breach without scaring off too many people. Meanwhile it’s continuously struggled with scandals like hiring opposition research firm Definers, and it saw its new teen app Lasso largely flop. Facebook will have to convince investors it knows how to win back the next generation, or at least keep squeezong a lot more money out of the last one like it did in Q4.
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Zuckerberg says the future is sharing via 100B messages & 1B Stories/day
The News Feed won’t sustain Facebook forever, and that’s scaring investors. Today on Facebook’s earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg stressed that sharing is shifting to private chat, where people send 100 billion messages per day on Facebook’s family of apps, and Stories, where he says people share 1 billion of these slideshows per day (though it’s unclear if that includes third-party apps like Snapchat).
But that means Facebook will have to realign its business towards these mediums where monetization is more complex and it has less experience. The result of Zuckerberg’s comments was a reversal of Facebook’s initial 2 percent share price gain after earnings were announced that dragged it down to a 3.5 percent loss. That was only reversed when Zuckerberg said Facebook would reduce limits on video advertising, pushing shares up 3 percent in after-hours trading.
Facebook’s year-over-year revenue growth has already slowed from 59 percent in Q3 2016, to 49 percent a year ago, to 33 percent now as Zuckerberg admits it’s hitting saturation in developed markets, plus it’s running out of News Feed space. Now it will both have to deal with the sharing medium shift, and that the new users it’s adding in the Asia-Pacific and Rest Of World regions earn it 10X less than users in North America.
Battling iMessage
In messaging, Zuckerberg says “People share more photos, videos, and links on WhatsApp and Messenger than they do on social networks.” He sees Facebook’s position as strong, saying “We’re leading in most countries”, though that’s mostly in the developing world Android market where people choose their own default messaging app. “Our biggest competitor by far is iMessage. In important countries like the US where the iPhone is strong, Apple bundles iMesssage as the default texting app, and it’s still ahead” Zuckerberg notes.
The “bundled” language harkens back to to antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft for bundling computers with Internet Explorer. With Apple CEO Tim Cook constantly harping on the poor privacy practices of ad-supported companies like Facebook, Zuckerberg might be gunning to draw regulator attention to iMessage.
Facebook is starting to more aggressively monetize Messenger through inbox ads, and its now selling enterprise tools to brands on both Facebook and WhatsApp that let them pay to ping users. But Facebook risks its chat apps seeming annoying or intrusive if it packs in too many ads or allows too much Message spam. Users could stray to status quos like iMessage and Android Messages if it puts monetization above the user experience.
Dominating Snapchat
On Stories, Zuckerberg says Facebook is doing even better. Over 1 billion people use its Stories features across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp each day, compared to 186 million daily users on Stories inventor Snapchat as a whole. Stories are where the majority of Facebook sharing growth is happening, and Facebook Stories are gaining momentum after a slow and buggy start. That’s why Zuckerberg never mentioned Snapchat, and instead talk about YouTube as its primary competitor in video.
The problem is that creating attractive video ads, especially vertical full-screen ones for Stories, is beyond the capability of the long-tail on small businesses that have fueled Facebook’s News Feed ad revenue. Users often rapidly skip through Stories ads, and Facebook currently doesn’t offer unskippable ones like Snapchat. Many people don’t think to tap or swipe up to visit a link from a Story, or simply don’t want to lose their place in ways that didn’t happen on desktop or even mobile feed ads.
Chasing YouTube
Beyond Stories, Facebook salvaged its after-hours share price by discussing how it plans to show more video, and therefore more of its lucrative video ads. Back in January, Facebook admitted its Q4 user count had declined and revenue might stumble in part because it had decided to show people fewer viral videos that they watch passively. This came as part of its drive for Time Well Spent. But now, Zuckerberg says that Facebook has cracked the code for how to make passive video consumption a positive experience, so Facebook will lift some limits:
“People really want to watch a lot of video. To a large degree we’ve had to rate limit its growth, and we need to do the things so we can stop limiting it. The things that have caused us to limit it are on the one hand, when we see passive consumption of video displacing social interactions . . . We needed to figure out a way that video can grow but people can also keep on interacting and doing what they tell us that they uniquely want from Facebook. And now I think we’re starting to work through what the formula is going to be so we can take some of those rate limits off and let video grow at the rate that it wants to. I feel that that’s a very exciting opportunity ahead.”
Across Facebook’s other products, Zuckerberg noted that 800 million people now use Marketplace, its Jobs feature have helped people find 1 million jobs, and its birthday fundraisers have raised $300 million alone this year. But it will be teaching advertisers how to effectively create sponsored messages and Stories ads that will define whether Facebook’s revenue keeps growing.
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Facebook loses $120 billion in market cap after awful Q2 earnings
Facebook’s share price fell over 20 percent in after-hours trading today after the company announced its slowest-ever user growth rate and a scary warning that its revenue growth would rapidly decelerate. Before today’s brutal Q2 earnings, Facebook’s share price closed today at $217.50 – a record high — but fell to around $172 after the earnings call. That’s a market cap drop of roughly $123 billion. In two hours, Facebook lost more value than most startups and even public companies are ever worth.
Here’s the full story on Facebook’s disastrous Q2 2018 earnings:
So why did Facebook’s share price sink like a stone? There are five big reasons:
Slowest-Ever User Growth Rate – Facebook’s monthly user count grew just 1.54, compared to 3.14 last quarter. Daily active users grew even slower at 1.44 percent, compared to 3.42 percent last quarter. For reference, 2.18 percent was its previous slowest DAU growth rate back in Q4 2017. Suddenly hitting this wall could limit Facebook’s total user count over the long-run, and its revenue with it. Facebook tried to distract from these facts by announcing a new “family of apps audience” metric of 2.5 billion people using at least one of its apps, which will hide the shift of users from Facebook to Instagram and WhatsApp.
User Count Shrank In Europe, Flat In US & Canada – Facebook saw its first-ever decline in monthly user count in Europe, from 377 million to 376 million. It got stuck at 241 million in the US & Canada after similarly pausing at 239 million in Q4 2017. Those are Facebook’s two most lucrative markets, with it earning $25.91 per user in North America and $8.76 in Europe. If those markets stall, even swift growth in the Rest Of World region where it earns just $1.91 per user won’t save it.
Decelerating Revenue Growth – Facebook’s revenue grew a remarkable 42 percent year-over-year this quarter. But CFO David Wehner warned that metric would decelerate by high single-digit percentage per quarter over the coming quarters. Wehner said a combination of currency headwinds, new privacy controls, and new experiences like Stories will contribute to the deceleration. This news is what caused Facebook’s share price to drop from -7 percent to `-20 percent.
Privacy And Well-Being – Q2 saw the debut of Europe’s GDPR that forced Facebook to change its privacy policies and get users to agree to how it collects data about them. Wehner blamed GDPR for Facebook loss of users in Europe. That law and Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal led the company to have to improve its privacy controls. These could make it tougher for Facebook to target people with ads or show their content to more people.
Meanwhile, Facebook has continued to adopt the “Time Well Spent” philosophy, removing click-bait news and crappy viral videos that lead to passive internet content consumption that studies say is unhealthy. Instead, Facebook is pushing features like Watch Party where users actively interact with each other. Those might not produce as much time on site and subsequent ad views, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the changes are “positive and we’re going to continue in this direction.”
The Shift To Stories – Facebook estimates that by in 2019, sharing via ephemeral vertical Stories slideshows will surpass sharing via feeds. The problem is that advertisers may be slower than users to make that shift. “Will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? We honestly don’t know” COO Sheryl Sandberg said. Stories ads might be full-screen and more immersive, but they don’t show off links to online stores as well, nor are they as well optimized from decades of banner ad experience by the industry.
Luckily, even though Snapchat invented the Stories format, Facebook has far more people using it each day, with 150 million Stories users on Facebook, 70 million on Messenger, 400 million on Instagram, and 450 million on WhatsApp . If Facebook does manage to figure out Stories ads, it could dominate, but it could take years for its advertiser count and ad prices to rise to offset the shift away from feeds.
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Facebook stock tanks from mixed Q2 with slowest-ever growth
Facebook has hit a wall. The social network succumbed to the public backlash over its handling of fake news, privacy, and digital wellbeing to miss some of Wall Street’s estimates, showing mixed results in its Q2 2018 earnings. GDPR, Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before congress, and more scandals appear to have contributed to Facebook’s weak user growth.
Facebook reached 2.23 billion monthly users, up just 1.54 percent, much slower than Q1’s 3.14 percent around where its growth rate has hovered for years. Facebook earned $13.23 billion in revenue, missing Thomson Reuters consensus estimates of $13.36 billion, but beat with $1.74 EPS compared to an estimated $1.72 EPS.
User Growth Troubles
Daily active users hit 1.47 billion, up an especially low 1.44 percent percent compared to Q1’s 3.42 percent. For comparison, before now Facebook’s slowest quarter-over-quarter daily user growth rate was 2.18 percent in Q4 2017. In an attempt to deflect attention from its weak user growth, Zuckerberg announced on the earnings call that 2.5 billion people use at least one of its apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger.
The stock market frowned on the slow growth rates, pushing Facebook’s share price down over 21 percent in after-hours trading to around $170 per share. That’s down from $217.50 when the markets closed. Initially the share price dropped 7 percent on news of slow user growth, but then fell much further when Facebook announced revenue growth would slow significantly in upcoming quarters.
The share price descent comes despite Facebook earning $5.106 billion in profit and revenue being up 42 percent year-over-year. Zuckerberg noted in the earnings release that “Our community and business continue to grow quickly”. And while that’s true if you’re looking year-over-year, Q2 could break that trend.
Facebook’s daily and monthly user counts were up 11 percent year-over-year, confirming that the momentum of its business is still overpowering its PR problems when you zoom out. And its DAU to MAU ratio held firm at 66 pecent, indicating that users are still visiting the site often. But the question for today’s earnings call will be whether time spent on the site has decreased significantly, dragging down revenue with it.
One tough spot for Facebook was that it got stuck at 241 million monthly US & Canada users, the same count as last quarter. After failing to grow in that core market in Q4 2017, it appears that Facebook finally has hit saturation at home after 14 years. And in Europe, Facebook lost 1 million users, sinking to 376 million monthlies. That could be sign that GDPR requirements and the annoying terms of service changes it had to get users to agree to deterred some from browsing. In fact, CFO David Wehner said the failure to grow in Europe was “due to the GDPR.”
Decelerating Revenue Growth
Facebook still managed to boost its average revenue per user in all markets, growing from $23.59 to $25.91 in the US & Canada, showing its targeting continues to improve and competition for ads is strong. But the fact that it’s stopped growing at home could weigh heavily on its share price. Facebook will have to continue to invent more ways to squeeze dollars out of its existing users.
The earnings call saw a worrying warning from Wehner, who said that after 42 percent year-over-year revenue growth this quarter, Facebook expected high single-digit drops each quarter to that metric over the next few quarters. “In terms of what’s driving the deceleration, it’s a combination of factors. First of all there’s currency that’s going from a tailwind to a modest headwind. Secondly, we’re going to be focusing on growing new experiences like Stories . . . and that’s going to have a negative impact on revenue growth. Andd we’re giving people who use the service more choice in terms of privacy.”
Looking back, the quarter saw Facebook clamp down on APIs for developers in hopes of preventing another Cambridge Analytica style disaster. Its CEO faced tough days of questioning from congress over the privacy problem, alleged bias against conservatives, and its failure to protect the 2016 presidential election. Facebook has faced tough questioning from reporters about its approach to fake news and election interference. Facebook tried to redirect attention away from its troubles during its F8 conference that saw it announce plans for a dating feature.
But all the problems may be taking a toll on user engagement, leading to the revenue miss. Weak daily and monthly user growth should be a big concern, and will put even more pressure on Instagram to prop up the corporation.
This article has been updated to reflect announcements from the earnings call.
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Facebook beats in Q1 and boosts daily user growth to 1.45B amidst backlash
Amongst massive criticism over data privacy, Facebook showed the resiliency of its advertising machine by beating Wall Street’s $11.41 billion revenue estimate in its Q1 2018 earnings report by raking in $11.97 billion in revenue with $1.69 EPS compared to the $1.35 estimate.
Facebook added 48 million daily active users to hit 1.449 billion, up 3.42 percent to revive Facebook’s growth after slower 2.18 percent growth last quarter. But Facebook only added 70 million monthly active users to reach 2.196 billion, a 3.14 percent growth rate that was a little slower than last quarter’s 3.39 percent growth. Both daily and monthly users are up 13 percent year-over-year, showing Facebook’s troubles haven’t paralyzed its growth.
This was perhaps the most tumultuous quarter since Facebook went public. Facebook faced intense criticism regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its data privacy practices, leading a massive pull-back of developer capabilities as Zuckerberg headed to testify before Congress. Last quarter saw Facebook’s first-ever decline in users in a market, with a 700,000 user drop in the U.S. & Canada market following changes to promote well-being that reduced the prevalence of viral videos.
Facebook was able to revive its U.S. & Canada user growth this quarter, perking back up to 185 million, from 184 million last quarter — though that’s just a return to where it was in Q3 2017. Monthly active user count in the market went from 239 to 241 million. That shows that while people might disagree with Facebook’s approach to privacy, they aren’t about to give up their News Feeds.
Demonstrating Facebook’s declining web presence, mobile made up $10.7 billion, or 91 percent of all ad revenue, up from 89 percent last quarter. Facebook reached $4.98 billion in profit, up from a weak $4.26 billion last quarter. Average Revenue Per User reached $5.53, up 30 percent year-over-year thanks to strong gains this quarter in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Facebook’s headcount has swelled 48 percent year-over-year as it’s now half-way to its promise of doubling its security and content moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018.
The recent scandals have put a lot of downward pressure on its share price, but apparently the company thinks it’s a good buy. It’s increased the amount authorized under a share repurchase program by an additional $9 billion, on top of an original $6 billion plan, of which it’s spent $4 billion. It’s partly to offset big stock distributions for employees, but CFO David Wehner also said it was “opportunistic,” aka related to Facebook perceiving its price as too low. Wall Street apparently liked the earnings report as shares are up over 4.38 percent to $166.68 in after-hours trading.
The question is whether the new ads transparency requirements, developer platform crackdown and Facebook’s quest to make using it healthier will show up in next quarter’s earnings. These changes could deter advertisers, give users less functionality to play with and remove low-quality viral content that might make users feel bad but keeps them scrolling.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that, “Despite facing important challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018. 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.” We’ll get to hear more from him at 2pm Pacific during the earnings call, so stay tuned here.
Updates from the earnings call:
- Zuckerberg said that Internet.org has now helped almost 100 million people connect to the internet, up from 40 million in November 2016.
- Zuckerberg said 200 million people are now in “meaningful Groups,” up from 100 million last year, though Facebook has a long way to its 1 billion goal.
- WhatsApp Status has pulled away as the most popular of Facebook’s Snapchat Stories clones. It was at 300 million daily users, equal to Instagram Stories, last time Facebook provided a stat.
- Since users are moving from feed reading to Stories watching, Facebook says it needs to make Stories ads as good as feed ads to protect its core revenue stream.
- Facebook CFO David Wehner warned that GDPR may cause Facebook’s European user count to be flat or shrink in Q2, and that it may have a minor impact on ad revenue.
- Zuckerberg says one of his biggest regrets is that Facebook didn’t get to shape the mobile ecosystem because the company was still small when iOS and Android launched. That’s why Zuckerberg is adamant about Facebook having a major role in the future of virtual reality and augmented reality, which he sees as computing platforms of the future.
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