Good Job, Everyone! Facebook Turned a $9 Billion Profit in Q3

Facebook may be going through arguably the worst information cycle of its whole existence proper now, however that didn’t cease it from raking in staggering earnings. Again.

The firm reported $29.01 billion in income within the third quarter, up from $21.47 billion the identical quarter final yr. The firm additionally reported some fairly meaty consumer numbers—about 1.9 billion every day lively customers, and a couple of.9 billion people utilizing Facebook’s apps every month. Out of the over $29 billion in income, Facebook squeezed out $9.2 billion in revenue.

Facebook’s inventory value popped about 3% in after-hours buying and selling following its earnings announcement, Bloomberg reported.

“We made good progress this quarter and our community continues to grow,” Mark Zucerberg stated in a press release forward of the official earnings name with reporters. “I’m excited about our roadmap, especially around creators, commerce, and helping to build the metaverse.”

What Zuck’s decidedly not enthusiastic about are among the information tales which have come out about his firm over the previous few days. A consortium of about 20 completely different information shops have been lately given entry to a fresh trove of documents from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen detailing among the firm’s worst offenses involving a failure to curb hate speech, misinformation, and a lot rather more. Those tales started trickling out over the weekend, with a deluge of latest stories arriving on Monday earlier than earnings have been introduced.

Facebook additionally snuck in a touch about how its stories are going to be altering from subsequent quarter on. Starting This fall of this yr, the corporate stated, it’s going to be splitting up earnings stories into two distinct segments. The first is Facebook’s “Family of Apps” or “FoA,” which consists of earnings from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Segment quantity two is “Facebook Reality Labs” or “FRL,” which incorporates the corporate’s myriad {hardware} and digital actuality merchandise. As a part of Zuckerberg’s push into VR and the broader metaverse (regardless of the hell that phrase really means), the corporate introduced that whereas it wouldn’t be ditching the Oculus title from its widespread model of VR headsets, it could be shifting the product under the FRL label, an area it shares with the a lot much less widespread Portal tablets.

While the continuing media shitstorm hasn’t but made a dent within the firm’s earnings, Apple’s ongoing privacy-centric updates to the iOS ecosystem is throwing issues into disarray. “Our outlook reflects the significant uncertainty we face in the fourth quarter in light of continued headwinds from Apple’s iOS 14 changes, and macroeconomic and COVID-related factors,” Facebook stated in its Q3 earnings abstract.

Facebook, for its half, had seen this coming for greater than a yr, partaking in a full-on PR marketing campaign towards the {hardware} big as quickly as a few of these impending modifications have been introduced. And now that extra customers are opting out of app-based monitoring than ever before with Apple’s assist, it looks like Facebook’s worst fears have come to go. Last month, one of many firm’s chief promoting executives, Graham Mudd, instructed advertisers that the corporate was having a tough time monitoring a large share of iOS customers by means of the Facebook ecosystem. This month, Mudd introduced that the corporate can be utterly overhauling the way in which it counts particular person customers throughout Facebook’s properties with a purpose to account for a few of these misplaced figures.

Of course, Facebook isn’t the one app feeling the brunt of Apple’s updates. When Snap missed its income aim by about $3 million this quarter, the corporate told investors on an earnings name that Apple’s “do not track” toggles have been accountable. Jeremi Gorman, Snap’s chief enterprise officer, stated on the decision that whereas the corporate “grappled with industry changes to the way advertising is targeted, optimized, and measured on iOS,” the most effective that it may, the income hit was “more significant” than the corporate anticipated. At the time, Snap’s grim warning about these impacts was estimated to wipe about $142 million off the market worth for Snap and fellow rivals, like Facebook and Google.