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Facebook
Inc.
may not be totally immune from controversy after all.
The titan of social media, which has so far shown little negative headline effects in recent months, has announced lower-than-expected revenue growth for the second quarter and put in warns against a slowdown in sales growth in the future, which would lower the price of its shares after trading hours. highs earlier Wednesday, dropped 24% to $ 165 in trading after hours.
Wednesday's results mark the first full quarter of financial results since the scandal erupted over Facebook's privacy practices. Since then, the cabinet has been subjected to scrutiny by lawmakers, regulators and journalists of all aspects of its business, forcing what one of its leaders has called "the greatest cultural change" of the company over the last ten years. The second quarter results show that Facebook's growth is slowing, including in some of its most lucrative markets.
Daily active users in the United States and Canada remained at $ 185 million over the first three months of the year and up slightly from the previous year. The daily Facebook user base in Europe has slightly decreased to 279 million accounts, compared with 282 million in the previous quarter. The decline, according to analysts, could come from a new European law on the protection of privacy that came into effect in the second quarter.
The results "showed growth, but geographically have pockets of sweetness," said
Daniel Ives,
Head of Technology Research at GBH Insights.
For the second quarter, Facebook reported earnings per share of $ 1.74, up from $ 1.32 a year ago. Revenues increased 42% to $ 13.23 billion. Analysts, on average, expected earnings of $ 1.72 per share on a $ 13.36 billion business, according to Thomson Reuters.
The last time Facebook missed analysts' estimates for revenue was in the first quarter of 2015.
Facebook's global reach and its impact on the world have been studied since the US presidential election of 2016, when she criticized articles to flourish on the site. In the fall of 2017, Facebook again switched to crisis mode after revealing that Russian-backed entities were using its platform and advertising tools to spread messaging messages to disrupt the 2016 campaign. [19659005] Facebook's next controversy came in March, when it revealed that it had suspended the Cambridge Analytica political analysis firm for mishandling the data of nearly 87 million users in the United States. Facebook. This disclosure forced the CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
to testify before the legislators at the beginning of April.
More recently, Facebook has been criticized for its misinformation policies. Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview last week that Facebook would not delete articles that promote conspiracy theories, such as those that claim that the Holocaust and the 2012 massacre never happened, because that Facebook did not want to be the arbiter of the truth. .
On Wednesday, the family of a Sandy Hook victim, Noah Pozner, urged Mr. Zuckerberg to reconsider this position. "We have endured cases of harassment, abuse and death threats online, by telephone and in person," wrote the parents, Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa. "We are currently living in hiding."
Despite these controversies, advertisers have generally remained on the site, largely because there are few other outlets that can reach their target and their ability to target narrow slices of consumers .
"It's going to take a lot more than the scandals that they had to change to the way advertisers use their dollars," he said.
Aaron Goldman,
marketing director of marketing analysis firm 4C Insights
The bulk of Facebook's success stems from Instagram's photo and video sharing app that Facebook has purchased in 2012 for $ 1 billion. According to the eMarketer data firm, Instagram is expected to generate more than $ 8 billion in worldwide advertising revenue this year.
Several marketing firms said new formats were driving new spending on Instagram, including Instagram-starred ads or photo and video mounts posted by users that disappeared after 24 hours.
Written at Deepa Seetharaman at [email protected]
