Facebook released it's Q4 2018 earnings report and it's raining money for them. 2.7 billion people engage with the family of apps and 2 billion people at least use Facebook or one of the networks everyday.
The numbers beat the growth expectations. They have risen 9 percent year over year. 1.52 billion people were using the platform everyday and it had 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 2018.
Userbase was either declining or flatlining in Europe and US & Canada in October 2018.
Users down in Europe, flat in U.S./Canada, the company's most lucrative advertising markets.
— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) October 30, 2018
Wall St. so far isn't too alarmed. They knew this was coming. pic.twitter.com/rRJvnhBtuG
It's a laborious task to take all aspects into account to analyze and find out what was the reason of the increasing numbers. Though, Instagram Stories now have 500 million active users per day, according to TechCrunch. Stories may have been the last game-changing feature responsible for the growth.
Also Read: Facebook Inc to integrate Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram!
Facebook's list of scandals like using 2FA for targeted advertising and shadow contact information, 120 million accounts being breached by hackers, 3 bugs that leading to the breach of 50 million Facebook accounts and Facebook making shady deals with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix & more to share users’ data may have affected it's growth for a while but not in the long run.
In the recently held DLD Conference on January 20, 2019, Sheryl Sandberg, COO, stated company's plan for 2019 in the wake of such instances.
The five things Facebook would be focussed on in 2019, as Sandberg states are; investing in safety and security, protecting against election interference, cracking down on fake accounts and fake information, making sure people feel like they control their own information, increasing transparency.
Organisation would also be pushing new products this year like encryption and ephemerality for security and privacy, expanding WhatsApp payments to new countries, videos would be moved from News Feed to Facebook Watch, Instagram commerce will be getting features and more.