Fb stories hovering quarterly advert income, inventory jumps – KIRO 7 Information Seattle

Facebook’s stock rose on Wednesday after the social media giant reported stronger-than-expected first-quarter results thanks to soaring advertising revenue.

The company said it made $ 9.5 billion, or $ 3.30 per share, for the period January through March. That’s 94% more than $ 4.9 billion or $ 1.71 per share last year.

Revenue increased 48% from $ 17.44 billion to $ 26.17 billion.

According to a survey by FactSet, analysts expected average earnings of $ 2.35 per share and revenue of $ 23.73 billion.

The average price of ads on Facebook increased 30% year over year, while the number of ads increased 12%.

Facebook had an average of 2.85 billion monthly users in March. That is 10% more than in the previous year. The app family – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – had 3.45 billion monthly users in March. This is the number of people who signed in to at least one of the apps during the month.

In January, the company forecast uncertainty for 2021 and said its earnings could face significant pressure in the second half of the year. With revenue growing so rapidly in the second half of 2020, Facebook could struggle to maintain this pace. That uncertainty has now been incorporated into the company’s forecast, so it came as no surprise to investors.

The shares of the Menlo Park, California-based company rose nearly 6% in after-hours trading.

On Monday, Apple introduced a new data protection function called “App Tracking Transparency” as part of an update to the operating system for iPhone and iPad. It came after a seven-month delay with the iPhone maker and Facebook attacking each other’s business models and motives for making decisions that affect billions of people around the world.

Until the new feature, Facebook and other apps could do their monitoring on iPhones automatically, unless users took the time and effort to change their settings to prevent it – something not many people have done.

While Facebook battled the change for months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that the new privacy controls could actually help his company in the long run. His rationale: the inability to automatically track iPhone users can lead more companies to sell their products directly on Facebook and Instagram if they can’t collect enough personal information to effectively target ads in their own apps. This would of course help Facebook’s bottom line.

Facebook announced on Wednesday that revenue growth in the second quarter of 2021 will remain stable or “accelerate slightly” compared to the growth rate in the first quarter. The Apple update is already included in these instructions.