facebook parent meta platforms inc is raking in digital ads as its earnings attest and wall street is rewarding it the companys stock was up more than 7 in afterhours trading wednesday meta metareported fiscal secondquarter net income of 779 billion or 298 a share compared with net income of 67 billion or 246 a share in the yearago quarter revenue climbed 11 to 32 billion from 288 billion in the yearago quarter analysts surveyed by factset had expected on average net income of 291 a share on revenue of 311billion a rebound in advertising the monetization of instagram and reels and aifueled ad targeting and measurement contributed to the quarters performance metas betterthanexpected performance comes on the heels of a similarly strong quarter from google parent googlgoogl alphabet inc and poor results from snap inc snap we had a good quarter we continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap ive seen in a while with llama 2 threads reels new ai products in the pipeline and the launch of quest 3 this fall meta chief executive mark zuckerberg said in a statement announcing the results ai has been an increasingly dominant story line for meta which has quickly shifted its focus from the metaverse zuckerberg said ai remains the companys nearterm focus with metaverse poised to have a longterm impact in many ways the two are interrelated zuckerberg said of ai and metaverse in a conference call with analysts he also spotlighted the potential of threads a twitterlike service that launched earlier this month with much fanfare when it gets to hundreds of millions of users well see how it monetizes he said it is a long road ahead meta executives forecast thirdquarter revenue of 32 billion to 345 billion while analysts on average were expecting 312 billion according to factset facebook had 206 billion daily active users up 5 from a year ago and the family of meta apps  which includes instagram  reported daily active users of 307 billion up 7 there were blips amid the hoopla however meta says it expects 2023 total expenses will be in the range of 88 billion to 91 billion compared to the prior range of 86 billion to 90 billion because of legalrelated expenses in the second quarter and metas headcount dropped 14 from a year ago to 71469 as of june 30 zuckerberg said metas austerity program will continue into 2024 metas stock improved 14 to 29857 in the regular session the stock has skyrocketed 148 so far this year while the broader sp 500 index has increased 19 this content was created by marketwatch which is operated by dow jones  co marketwatch is published independently from dow jones newswires and the wall street journal