Facebook posts strong first quarter despite privacy scandal

The results marked the company’s first quarterly earnings report since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted almost six weeks ago. Compared to the first quarter of 2017, Facebook’s advertising revenue – which accounts for more than 95 percent of the company’s revenue total – increased by 50 percent from $7.9 billion to $11.8 billion.

The company also claimed daily active users (1.45bn) and monthly active users (2.20bn) were both up 13% year-on-year.

Another point of contention to come up during the hearing came around Facebook’s 2015 hiring of Joseph Chancellor, Kogan’s former business partner and cofounder at Global Science Research (GSR), the company that was contracted by Cambridge Analytica’s parent organization to take in and analyze Facebook user data.

The lucrative social media company also seems to have survived the subsequent #DeleteFacebook online trend, as the number of daily and monthly users, and posts also surged.

Mobile advertising was the main component of ad revenue – a notable 91%, up from 85% a year ago. It has also introduced a verification process for political advertisers and page administrators and plans to comply with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“It’s clear now we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well – whether it’s foreign interference in elections, fake news, hate speech or app developers and data privacy”, Zuckerberg stated. The social network’s stock rose 3.5% on Wednesday following the positive earnings news.

“I want to start by echoing our CEO, Mark Zuckerberg: what happened with Cambridge Analytica represents a breach of trust, and we are deeply sorry”. It then transferred that data to Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that later was hired by President Donald Trump, so that the firm could assemble psychographic profiles of voters.

Additionally, Facebook now hires more staff than ever before.

Facebook, which generates revenue primarily by selling advertising personalized to its users, has demonstrated for several quarters how resilient its business model can be as long as users keep coming back to scroll through its News Feed and watch its videos. Data in the archive will also show how many people may have seen each ad, and how much was paid for their display. Another poll by Axios and SurveyMonkey found that Facebook’s favourability fell 28 points in the past five months – more than twice as much as that of rivals Amazon and Google.

Zuckerberg said the outrage had no material effect on Facebook operations in April.

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