As it skates into its second-quarter earnings announcement, it would seem the only problems Facebook has are the ones it creates for itself.
A year ago at this time. Mark Zuckerberg was fielding uncomfortable questions about whether teenagers were drifting away from the service. A recent report by Forrester put those concerns mostly to rest, concluding that Facebook remains the most popular social network among teens by far. (The next most popular: Facebook-owned Instagram.)
Quarter after quarter, Facebook outperforms analysts' expectations while leaving plenty of revenue levers untouched. It's barely started to monetize Instagram or WhatsApp, and it's only just begun experimenting with e-commerce in the form of a "Buy" button on posts. (Let's just pretend that whole Facebook Gifts thing never happened.)
The bugbears that keep its rivals up at night -- user growth for
If it weren't for that little psychology experiment carried out on almost 700,000 unwitting Facebook users, this afternoon's conference call with Zuckerberg would threaten to be awfully boring. Let's hope an analyst asks about it, and also about the launch of Slingshot, Facebook's latest attempt at creating a photo-sharing app as popular as Snapchat. It looks like a fizzle so far. [Update: Neither came up. Sigh.]
I'll have more after the earnings release and conference call.
Update: Once again, Facebook's results came in ahead of the analysts' consensus -- way ahead, according to Seeking Alpha. The company reported $2.9 billion in revenue, a 66% jump over the same quarter in 2013, and net income of more than $1 billion. "We had a good quarter," is how Zuckerberg put it in the earnings release. More after the call.
