Facebook Continues to Register Strong Growth, Despite All The Scandals And Outrage

It may not have been the most peaceful past year or so for Facebook, but the social network continues to defy the odds. And in many ways shows its resilience in the face of all the data privacy scandals and the troubles with data breaches. The company reported the Q4 2018 earnings, and the financial results clearly don’t give the hint of any trouble elsewhere. Facebook has revealed that its income rose to $6.9 billion for the October-December 2018 quarter. This is up from $4.26 billion in the same quarter in 2017, which incidentally was before the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal broke out early last year—and that is an increase of 61 percent. Revenue increased to $16.9 billion, up from $12.97 billion in the same quarter the year before.

Most importantly, users don’t seem to be abandoning the social network, and even more so, are using it more than ever before. Facebook reported that on an average, 1.52 billion people using Facebook every day in December 2018, which is an increase of 9 percent year on year. Monthly active users, now at 2.32 billion, were also up 9 percent year on year.

"Our community and business continue to grow," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "We've fundamentally changed how we run our company to focus on the biggest social issues, and we're investing more to build new and inspiring ways for people to connect."

These numbers, despite the entire 2018 being littered with one data privacy scandal after the other, including Mark Zuckerberg being forced to testify at the US Congress, really do indicate the product has evolved enough to keep users hooked. Facebook also said that 2.7 billion users access and use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger, which they categorize as the "Family" of services, every month. The company estimates that more than 2 billion people use at least one of these Family service apps every day, on average.

Whichever way you look at the numbers, there really doesn’t seem to be any negative user sentiment, at least on Facebook’s balance sheet.