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On the face of it, Facebook has been having one of the worst weeks in its history. A series of over 50 news stories have laid out Facebook’s utter failure to police its own platform and protect its users, and highlighted just how much the company knew about their problems.
And yet, by the close of trading on Monday, the company’s share price had risen by 1%.
The reason: Facebook had once again shown its ability to grow and make money, even during its most turbulent times.
In an earnings call on Monday night, the company reported $29 billion in revenue for the three months to the end of September, up a whopping 35% from the same period a year earlier.
Of that, nearly $9.2 billion was profit, a 17% increase from last year. So where did all that extra money come from? The number of people using Facebook’s family of apps grew a massive 12% year-over-year.
In its early years, Facebook regularly posted eye-watering growth figures, but as the company has saturated markets across the globe, its rate of growth has naturally slowed—which makes the figure announced by the company on Monday night all the more remarkable.
Facebook now has nearly 3.6 billion users globally. That is almost two thirds of the world’s adult population using one of the company’s apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The flood of stories in the Facebook Papers series published in recent days may have an impact on the current quarter’s earnings. And Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has indicated that new leaks of internal documents will continue to trickle out until the end of November.
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