What's going on?

After two weeks of poor results from tech companies, Facebook reported its results � and absolutely smashed it! The stock was up about 8% immediately after the news.

What does this mean?

Facebook made about 25% more profit than investors were expecting � that�s a lot! Its success on mobile devices helped its revenue from advertising (like that stuff you see on your newsfeed) jump 57% vs. one year ago. Its user growth was better than expected with daily average users up 16% from last year. There are now 1.09 billion people on Facebook…every day! In short, Facebook did better than expected on every metric that�s important to investors. Here�s a good overview of where the Facebook empire stands today:

Why should I care?

For the stock: Can it get any better for Facebook? Perhaps, but perhaps not� Facebook has grown its advertising revenue so much that it’s going to become hard to keep growing at anywhere near the same pace � and investors expecting such growth could be disappointed. However, Facebook does have a huge amount of extremely valuable data on its users so, perhaps, it is attractive enough to advertisers to keep reaping their ad spend (and that�s not even considering its other potential sources of revenue, like Messenger, virtual reality and, probably, artificial intelligence).

The bigger picture: Mark Zuckerberg is changing the structure of Facebook so that he can give lots of money to charity – while keeping control of his company. Facebook is creating new shares that do not have voting rights attached to them. Current investors will be given those shares for free (so that their ownership stake is not diluted) and can, in turn, freely trade them on the market (Facebook explains its rationale and how it works here). That will allow Mark Zuckerberg to sell some stock – and fulfill his promise to give a ton of money to charity – but still maintain control of Facebook via the voting shares that he will retain.