Facebook Beats Expectations Again with Q2 Earnings

Facebook Inc. reported a strong second-quarter with $9.32 billion in revenue—beating Q1 earnings and surpassing analyst estimates once again.

The social media company’s Q2 earnings mean its revenue is up 45 per cent from $6.4 billion for the same quarter last year.

The steady increase in earnings was largely driven by a bump in mobile advertising revenue fueled by an increase in the price of advertisements and boost in user engagement. Just last month Facebook hit a milestone of two billion active members.

But that ad revenue growth is slowing down and the social media company is shifting more focus onto Instagram, an app that’s frequently added new capabilities and attracted new users.

With Instagram stories and face filters, the photo sharing application has adopted features that have pinned the app against Snapchat–and it looks like Instagram is winning. In April, Instagram pulled ahead of Snapchat for daily active users while Snap Inc. shares have steadily declined over the past two months.

Facebook is the second Silicon Valley giant to release their earnings report card this week. On Monday, Google’s Alphabet announced $26 billion in Q2 revenue and shared that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was joining Alphabet’s board of directors.

For the past 16 consecutive quarters, Facebook has exceeded analysts’ profit expectations.