Facebook 3Q Revenue Slightly Below Expectations

Facebook is reporting a slight revenue miss but stronger than expected profit in its third-quarter earnings report.

Coming three months after the company’s stock suffered its worst one-day drop in history, wiping out $119 billion of its market value, the mixed results were perhaps not the redemption Facebook hoped for.

But shares inched a bit higher after-hours, suggesting, at least, that the social media giant didn’t further spook investors. With the myriad problems Facebook has been grappling with lately, this is likely good news for the company.

Facebook had 2.27 billion monthly users at the end of the quarter, below the 2.29 billion analysts were expecting. Facebook says it changed the way it calculates users, which reduced the total slightly. The company’s user base was still up 10 percent from 2.07 billion monthly users a year ago.

Earnings were $1.76 a share and revenue was $13.73 billion, an increase of 33 percent, for the July-September period.

Analysts had expected earnings of $1.46 per share on revenue of $13.77 billion, according to FactSet.

The company warned last quarter that its revenue growth will slow down significantly for at least the rest of this year and that expenses will continue to balloon. The following day the stock plunged 19 percent. It was the biggest one-day plunge in history, and the shares not only haven’t recovered, they’ve since fallen further amid a broader decline in tech stocks .

Facebook’s investors, users, employees and executives have been grappling not just with questions over how much money the company makes and how many people use it, but its effects on users’ mental health and worries over what it’s doing to political discourse and elections around the world. Is Facebook killing us? Is it killing democracy?

The problems have been relentless for the past two years. Facebook can hardly crawl its way out of one before another comes up. It began with “fake news” and its effects on the 2016 presidential election (a notion CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially dismissed) and continued with claims of bias among conservatives that still haven’t relented.

Then there’s hate speech, hacks and a massive privacy scandal in which Facebook exposed user data to a data mining firm, along with resulting moves toward government regulation of social media.

Amid all this, there have been sophisticated attempts from Russia and Iran to interfere with elections and stir up political discord in the U.S.

Facebook’s stock climbed $2.68, or 1.8 percent, to $148.90 in after-hours trading.
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