Facebook’s Q2 Lands on Target, But Investors Run

First look at Facebook’s earnings: Profit of 12 cents per share on revenue of $1.18 billion. The consensus was 12 cents and $1.15 billion. Now on to other crucial numbers, like user growth.

Would you like a canned quote from Mark Zuckerberg? Okay: “Our goal is to help every person stay connected and every product they use be a great social experience. That’s why we’re so focused on investing in our priorities of mobile, platform and social ads to help people have these experiences with their friends.”

Some news that should cheer investors: Ad revenue was up 28 percent, to $992 million. That still represents deceleration from Q1’s growth rate, but that number is a bit higher than analysts were expecting.

And here are the engagement numbers.

• Monthly active users (MAUs) were 955 million as of June 30, 2012, an increase of 29 percent year over year: In line with expectations.
• Daily active users (DAUs) were 552 million on average for June 2012, an increase of 32 percent year over year: Much higher than the 19 percent consensus.
• Mobile MAUs were 543 million as of June 30, 2012, an increase of 67 percent year over year.

If you want insight on how Facebook’s ad business is really performing, or how the mobile transition is going, or anything else for that matter, you’re going to have to wait a bit. Not a much color in this release at all.

But, also: Not a whiff of the problems that sunk Zynga, Netflix and Apple this week. FB is trading down 5 percent, but my hunch is that it’s getting reprimanded for not jumping much higher over a pretty low bar — not because Wall Street is overly worried.

See you back here around 4:55 pm ET for live coverage of the call.