For about an hour Wednesday afternoon, it looked like Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg did it again.
Mobile advertising revenue, closely watched by Wall Street, continued its surge in the third quarter and profits exceeded forecast.
Other metrics — overall revenue, its monthly active users and total advertising revenue — were also strongly ahead.
The positive results, released after the markets had closed, sparked a 15 percent spike in its share price, to a new 52-week high over $56.
Cue the champagne.
But during a 5 p.m. conference call with analysts, the company said that during the July-September quarter it saw a decrease in daily usage among teens, a crucial demographic.
Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman told analysts that while the number of teens using the site remained stable from the second quarter to the third quarter, there was a slight drop in how often they came to the site.
“We did see a decrease in daily users, especially among younger teens,” Ebersman said.
By the time the hour-long call ended, Facebook shares had returned to Earth with a thud.
They had given back all their gains and were slightly down after hours.
A slowdown in Facebook’s ad load could also have played into the stock-price turnaround.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company’s ad load in the third quarter rose only slightly above 5 percent, Ebersman told analysts, from about 5 percent in previous quarters.
The CFO hinted that it would not increase much more going forward.
“There seems to be concern about the ad load not going up,” BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield told Reuters.
Still, Facebook investors, in anticipation that the social network giant would continue its strong growth in mobile, had pushed the stock up to a high of $54.22 earlier this month — double the price in July.
Meanwhile, advertising budgets for mobile remain at a measly 3 percent even as social-media usage on smartphones climbs, suggesting room for revenue growth, said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
“We are in the early stages of a major transition in advertising” and Facebook is “in a position to capitalize” on that shift, Sandberg said.
Total revenue in the quarter that ended Sept. 30 surged to $2.02 billion as the company continued inroads, first seen last quarter, toward convincing advertisers to buy mobile ads.
Wall Street analysts were expecting that the social-networking site, which just went public last year, to post total revenues of $1.91 billion.
Facebook also posted better-than-expected net income excluding charges, such as stock-based compensation, of $621 million, or 25 cents a share, compared to $311 million, or 12 cents, last year.
Revenue from mobile phones brought in $880 million last quarter, or 49 percent of Facebook’s total advertising revenues, up from $150 million in the year-ago quarter.