Facebook posted strong financial numbers for its fourth quarter Wednesday, beating on earnings and revenue and sending shares up more than 12 percent in extended trading. Active user metrics continue to rise, though slowly. Here's how the company did compared with what Wall Street predicted: Earnings: $2.38 per share, vs. $2.19 forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates

$2.38 per share, vs. $2.19 forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates Revenue: $16.91 billion, vs. $16.39 billion forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates

$16.91 billion, vs. $16.39 billion forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates Daily active users: 1.52 billion, vs. 1.52 billion forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates

1.52 billion, vs. 1.52 billion forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates Monthly active users: 2.32 billion, vs. 2.32 billion forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates

2.32 billion, vs. 2.32 billion forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates Average revenue per user: $7.37, vs. $7.11 forecast by FactSet It proved to be a strong financial quarter for Facebook, despite growing public outrage over the company's privacy practices. Earnings per share jumped 65 percent from the year-ago period. Net income totaled $6.88 billion, a record profit for the company and an increase of 61 percent from the year-ago quarter.

Facebook's average revenue per user, or ARPU, crushed analyst estimates, at $7.37 — a 21 percent increase from last quarter and a 19 percent increase from last year. The company's next report could be shakier, though. Facebook is expecting revenue deceleration for the first quarter of 2019 and projecting full-year expenses to jump between 40 percent and 50 percent from the full year of 2018.

Community metrics

Daily active users and monthly active users during the December quarter exactly matched expectations, each jumping 1.8 percent quarter over quarter, and 8.6 percent year over year. The increases represent slower growth than in recent quarters but still indicate that the company's data scandals and public privacy disclosures haven't dinged engagement too drastically. Daily active users grew in every geographic area, reversing a downward trend in Europe and a plateau in North America. Monthly active users stayed flat in North America but jumped in every other region — posting particularly strong growth in Asia-Pacific. Facebook will soon stop reporting user metrics for the core Facebook platform, Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said on the company's earnings call. Instead the company will start reporting "family metrics." "We believe these numbers better reflect the size of our community and the fact that many people are using more than one of our services," Wehner said. "For the time being we will continue to disclose both set of numbers, but over time we expect family metrics will play the primary role in how we talk about our company, and we will eventually phase out Facebook-only community metrics." That makes some sense for Facebook, given the impressive growth of WhatsApp and Instagram compared with Facebook's core platform. But it's a change not unlike the reporting structure shake-up at Apple that scared investors.

Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been drilling down on the company's Stories feature, a Snapchat-like sharing option for temporary photos and videos. Last quarter, Zuckerberg said Stories would become "a bigger medium than Feed has been" and said users across the Facebook family of apps — including WhatsApp and Instagram — post more than 1 billion Stories per day. Zuckerberg said on the company's earnings call Wednesday that Instagram sees 500 million daily active users in its Stories feature alone, and that Facebook's family of apps sees 2.7 billion monthly active users globally, up from 2.6 billion last quarter. The company didn't offer Stories user metrics for the core Facebook platform, which has grown more slowly. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook counts more than 7 million active advertisers, including 2 million advertisers within Stories.

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