back to article Facebook fails to wow Wall Street with slow profit growth

Facebook posted strong revenue for its first quarter of fiscal 2013, beating analyst estimates, but profits only inched ahead slightly as the social network continued to struggle with its transition to a mobile-first company. Total revenue for the quarter was $1.46bn, up 38 per cent from the previous year's Q1 but down 8 per …

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  1. Eddy Ito

    Alternate indicator

    "Monthly active users (MAUs) hit 1.11 billion, up from 901 million in Q1 of 2012"

    How long before someone does some analysis and decides that overall economic activity and hiring rates are inversely proportional to MAUs and that greater FB usage is an excellent recession indicator.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Does not matter

      Does not matter what your turnover is, if you do not make sufficient profit the business becomes unsustainable.

      1. JDX Gold badge

        Re: Does not matter

        If you make $0 profit after R&D, paying all your staff, etc, you are still sustainable.

        200m seems an OK profit to me, they're working on a margin of ~15%, considering how much they're spending.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Facebook

      A glorified Ponzi scheme, eventually it will run out of people that want to join and will die a slow agonising death.

  2. Zola

    Of these DAU/MAU figures, what would be really interesting

    is knowing how many of these "active" users haven't actually posted anything in the last 6 months, or longer.

    I bet there are a large number of people that setup Facebook accounts years ago, when it was new, then adding the account to their smartphone, and have long since gotten over Facebook - but would still be counted as "active" users today, because their smartphone devices continue to automatically log in to their account.

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: Of these DAU/MAU figures, what would be really interesting

      Seems you are looking for data to fit your opinion rather than being objective about it.

      For one thing, how do you know a smartphone counts as a daily user if it is not actively used to check the site?

      Your theory also has a big hole, that people change phones quite often on average so those who are "over it" would get weeded out every time they upgrade. Of course there'd be some lag...

      1. h3

        Re: Of these DAU/MAU figures, what would be really interesting

        Because when it comes to these types of statistics they always use the one that suits their purposes best.

        (So much that they become almost meaningless).

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