Facebook hits 1.71B users as it crushes Q2 earnings with $6.44B revenue, shares soar 9%

Coming off an all-time high stock price of $123.34, Facebook in Q2 2016 smashed earnings again. The social network continued steady growth just slightly slower than at 3.63% compared to last quarter’s 3.77%, adding 60 million this quarter to reach 1.71 billion monthly users. It scored $6.44 billion in revenue and $0.97 EPS, surpassing estimates of $6.02 billion and $0.82 EPS. That’s its 16th beat out of 17 quarters since it went public at $38 per share. Wall Street reacted to the positive earnings with a 7.5% bump in after hours trading to $132.60.

Revenue growth was 59% year over year, which looks favorable compared to competitor Twitter, who yesterday announced its YOY revenue growth sunk to 20% from 60% a year ago. With 84% of ad revenue from mobile, total ad revenue was $6.24 billion.

Though the big monthly user count gets the spotlight, Facebook’s daily active user count is a better measure of its health. Total DAUs reached 1.13 billion, with 1.57 billion mobile MAUs. 

Facebook’s efficient social network operation raked in $2.05 billion in profit, compared to $719 million a year ago, while average revenue per user is now $3.82, up a big 15% from last quarter.

Facebook hit with bad press while product keeps winning

Facebook’s Q2 was marred by several bouts of negative press. Allegations from anonymous sources suggested it was purposefully suppressing conservative news Trends. Facebook denied the allegations and its internal investigation found no proof, but it vowed to better train Trend curators to avoid bias.

Later, on the behalf of its users, it changed the News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family over stories from news publishers and brands. It’s still too early to draw conclusions on the size of the drop in reach and referral traffic for publishers, though Facebook admitted it’d be significant.

Facebook Live continued its growth, pulling some attention from Twitter’s acquisition Periscope that beat it to market last year. Live got new creative expression features and an API to help broadcasters use professional equipment.

Facebook’s secondary products enjoyed big milestones. Facebook Messenger hit 1 billion active users, thanks to constant product iteration like the new addition of an end-to-end encryption option, though also the fact that Facebook removed chat from its main app and forced users to download Messenger.

Meanwhile, Instagram reached 500 million users. Its community bristled at the announcement that an algorithmic feed would start highlighting the most popular posts instead of showing a purely reverse chronological stream. But that backlash hasn’t seemed to hurt Instagram too bad.

Overall, it looks like Facebook isn’t slowing down despite its massive size.