Twitter and Google grow profits as Facebook slumps amid 'fake news' and privacy concerns

Twitter has reported a rise in profits in 2019 while rival social network Facebook faced a rare fall in profits last year.

Twitter, the social media platform favoured by journalists, grew profits by a fifth to $1.46bn on revenues of £3.46bn for the year, new figures show.

Chief executive Jack Dorsey said it had been a “great year” for the US firm, which is focusing on providing a “more personalised experience” for users.

Facebook

Meanwhile Facebook has struggled to combat ongoing privacy and disinformation issues, which have been widely reported in the press.

The social media giant, which also owns Whatsapp and Instagram, posted $18.4bn (£14.1bn) in profits last year, down 16 per cent on the year before.

But the company sill grew its advertising revenues by more than a fifth (27 per cent) year-on-year to $69.65bn (£53.85).

Advertising continues to account for nearly all of the social network’s income, which totalled $70.7bn (£54.66) in 2019.

Facebook said it had an average of 1.66bn daily active users across all of its platforms, including Messenger, in December 2019, up nine per cent year-on-year.

Staff numbers had also grown by a fifth year-on-year to nearly 45,000.

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said: “This was a good quarter for our community and our business, and a strong end to the year.

“There are now around 2.9bn people using Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp or Messenger each month, and around 2.3bn people using at least one of our services daily.

“There are now more than 140m small businesses that use our services to grow – the vast majority of which use our services for free.

“Last year I shared our four company priorities, and they’re still our priorities in 2020: making progress on the major social issues, building qualitatively new product experiences, continuing to grow our business, and getting out there and communicating more transparently.”

Google

Google parent company Alphabet also published its full-year financial results this week. The US company, which also owns Youtube, made a total of $161.85bn (£125.1bn) in revenues 2019, up a fifth year-on-year.

Of this, more than half, $98.1bn (£75.8bn), was from Google search advertising, which was up by 15 per cent on last year and 40 per cent on 2017.

Youtube adverts accounted for $15bn (£11.6bn) of total ad revenues in 2019, up more than a third (36 per cent) on the year before and 86 per cent on 2017.

Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said: “Our investments in deep computer science, including artificial intelligence, ambient computing and cloud computing, provide a strong base for continued growth and new opportunities across Alphabet.

“I’m really pleased with our continued progress in Search and in building two of our newer growth areas — Youtube, already at $15bn in annual ad revenue, and Cloud, which is now on a $10bn revenue run rate.”

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