Constant controversy hasn’t stopped Facebook from making money

When it comes to public perception, Facebook hasn’t had the best 2018 so far. Over the past few months, the company’s been working hard to clean up its image after dealing with a series of nightmares, including the idea that the site was becoming toxic and, most recently, the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal that led CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before US Congress. But business goes on, and today Facebook released its Q1 2018 earnings report, which shows it made a revenue of $11.97 billion, an insane 49 percent year-over-year increase.

That amount of cash puts its profits up 63 percent compared to the same period in 2017, while its daily and monthly active users continue to grow at a steady pace — 13 percent each year-over-year in this last quarter. (1.45 and 2.2 billion daily and monthly active users, respectively.) It may not seem like a huge margin at first glance, but when you’re Facebook and you have over 2 billion users, a 13 percent increase is still good enough to move the needle in a significant way. Considering that the company has been under fire for most of 2017 and the better part of 2018, these numbers reveal that its bottom line isn’t exactly being affected.

It’s worth noting that news of the Cambridge Analytica “breach of trust” didn’t break until March 17th, which was near the end of the first quarter of 2018. This means we likely won’t see the full effect of that, if any, on Facebook’s business until it releases its Q2 earnings report in a few months. We’ll probably hear more about that topic when Zuckerberg hosts a conference call today at 5PM ET, so stay tuned to this post as we’ll be updating it live with any interesting details that may stem from it.

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