Facebook continues to grow substantially, despite the privacy scandals with which the social media company has to deal. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the way in which the company is run is “fundamentally changed”, which means that Facebook can now concentrate better on the biggest social problems. Also, solid investment is still being made.
Revenue increased 30 percent to 16.9 billion dollars compared to a year earlier, thanks to sharply higher revenues from advertisements. That growth at Facebook is stronger than in average analysts had anticipated.
Record
Net profit also rose by 61 percent to a record of nearly 6.9 billion dollars. A year ago, the profit was still very low in relation to the changed tax rules by President Donald Trump. In March last year came out that the company Cambridge Analytica had unauthorized access to personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users. That personal information would have been used for the Trump election campaign. This issue and others continue to haunt Facebook. Recently rumours circulated that there may still be a hefty fine in the United States.
More users
However, there is no question of a decrease in the global number of users. The number of daily active users climbed in December on an annual basis by 9 percent to an average of more than 1.5 billion. In what is more privacy-sensitive Europe, according to experts, there was a decrease in the number of users in the previous two quarters. But in the meantime, growth has also started here again. Facebook has calculated that currently around 2.7 billion people in the world use Facebook or the other services Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
However, it remains noisy around the company. Apple has given Facebook a finger on their Facebook research App. A certain account with which Facebook can test apps has been tightly restricted according to tech sites. The move follows news that Facebook in recent years paid teenagers of sometimes only 13 years old to install an app. Secretly, Facebook then looked at what they were doing on their phone.
