• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 30, 2018

Facebook reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings per share on Tuesday.

Although quarterly revenue was up 33% to $13.7 billion, it was still short of analyst expectations. Worse, Facebook’s community activity failed to impress Wall Street. 

From September 2017 to September 2018, daily active users (DAUs) increased 9% to 1.49 billion. During the same period, monthly active users (MAUs) increased 10% to 2.27 billion.

Cofounder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg waxed optimistic over Facebook’s future on Tuesday.

“We’re building the best services for private messaging and stories, and there are huge opportunities ahead in video and commerce as well,” he said in an earnings statement.

Every month, Facebook now estimates that roughly 2.6 billion people use its flagship property, along with WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, while about 2 billion visit at least one of those properties daily.

Mobile ad revenue continues to represent an ever larger share of Facebook’s total ad revenue. During the third quarter, mobile ad revenue represented approximately 92% of all ad revenue -- up from approximately 88% of total ad revenue, year-over-year.

Despite Facebook’s mixed performance, some marketers say Facebook is more important than ever to their digital strategies.

“The [third quarter] earnings have shown yet again that for marketers, no other platform comes close to Facebook and its family of apps, in terms of scale and audience engagement,” Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Socialbakers CEO, said on Tuesday. “With 2.27 billion monthly active users, it is still the platform where most consumer engagement with brands is happening online.”

Looking ahead, some analysts see Facebook’s problems as beyond its control.

“We continue to view the long-run revenue opportunities for Facebook more negatively than much of the investment community because we see limits to growth for the overall advertising industry,” Pivotal Research Group’s Brian Wieser wrote in a note to investors on Tuesday.