Will the tech juggernaut that is Facebook ever slow down? Looking at its first quarter results for 2017, it seems not. Yet again, the social media site beat estimates, bringing in a touch over $8 billion in revenue and a net profit of $3 billion, an increase of 76 percent compared to the same period last year.
Facebook is currently growing at a faster rate - 4.3 percent - than last quarter. It now boasts an incredible 1.94 billion active monthly users around the world, an 18 percent jump from a year ago. At this rate, it should hit the 2 billion user milestone in Q2 2017.
While it feels like almost everyone in the US and Canada already uses the site, Facebook managed to add 3 million new monthly users from this market during Q1. In the Asia-Pacific region, it added 43 million users.
"We had a good start to 2017," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "We're continuing to build tools to support a strong global community."
The all-important average revenue per user figure was also up, from $3.32 during Q1 2016 to $4.23.
With the recent Cleveland murder being uploaded to Facebook, and the Livestreaming of a Thai man killing his 11-month-old daughter, the company has faced criticism for being too slow when it comes to taking down flagged content. To improve response times, it is adding 3000 new staff to the already 4500-strong community operations team.
It's not only violent videos and images that plague Facebook; the site continues to have a fake news problem. Facebook has acknowledged this and attempted to address the issue in a number of different ways since the US election, but it appears the problem hasn't hurt user numbers.