Facebook revenue up 29% in face of sustained scrutiny

Facebook reported 29% year-on-year revenue growth to $17.7 billion in the third quarter of 2019, as it continues to weather the pervasive scrutiny surrounding its practices.

Advertising revenue grew to $17.4 billion in the three months to 30 September, up 28% year-on-year. Mobile ad revenue now accounts for 94% of total ad sales, the company said, up from 92% a year earlier.

The social network earned $6.1 billion in net income in the quarter, up 19% year-on-year, and significantly higher than Q2’s $2.6 billion profit, impacted by its FTC settlement.

“We had a good quarter and our community and business continue to grow,” said Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a statement. “We are focused on making progress on major social issues and building new experiences that improve people’s lives around the world.”

User growth

The platform reached 2.45 billion monthly users in the third quarter, up 1.65% from Q2 2019, and it now has 1.62 billion daily active users, up 2% from the last quarter.

It added 12 million daily active users in Asia-Pacific, which now represents 39% of its daily user base—more than double that of the US & Canada and Europe. It added 20 million daily active users in the ‘Rest of World’ region, its second biggest.

However, it did notably gain 2 million daily active users in both the US & Canada and Europe markets—which now count 189 million and 288 million daily users respectively—after flatlining in the previous quarter.

Facebook said it counts more than 2.8 billion monthly users across its family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, and 2.2 billion daily users.

Asia-Pacific also represented the highest region for growth in revenue by user geography; that metric grew by 8.5% to $3.3 billion in Asia-Pacific, followed by 7.5% in ‘Rest of World’ to $1.8 billion, 4.6% to $8.5 billion in the US & Canada, and 0.4% to $4.1 billion in Europe.

Political stance

Facebook’s Q3 analyst call took place shortly after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey revealed the platform was to ban all political advertising from running on its platform.

Zuckerberg maintained Facebook’s decision to continue running political ads was the best approach in the call. He added that political ads will account for less than 0.5% of revenue next year.

“Some people accuse us of allowing the speech because they think that all we care about is making money, and that’s wrong,” Zuckerberg said.

Elsewhere, the company saw headcount grow 28% year-over-year to 43,000, as it continued to rapidly hire content moderators to review the content on its platform.