Net profit for the full year climbed to $3.7 billion from $2.9 billion in 2014, while revenue jumped to $17.9 billion from $12.5 billion.
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Facebook delivers another quarter of record revenue as it sells more ads via videos, mobile devices and Instagram, sending its shares up more than 8%.
“We believe Facebook is well positioned to increase its share of digital ad spend as well as to help grow the overall category given its reach and effectiveness for advertisers”, Goldman Sachs analysts said in a client note.
Advertising revenue, which accounts for the bulk of Facebook’s earnings, came in at $5.6 billion for the quarter, also well ahead of the $5.2 billion that analysts had estimated.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who returned from two months of paternity leave on Monday, has said virtual reality represents the next major computing platform.
In December, the social network had an average 1.04 billion users each day, up 17 percent from a year earlier.
For the fourth quarter, Facebook reported net income of $US1.56 billion, or 54 cents per share, up from $US701 million, or 25 cents a share reported a year ago.
During the last three months of 2015, Facebook brought in $5.8 billion – growth of 52 percent.
The additional options will expand Facebook beyond the renowned thumbs-up symbol that people click on to show they like a comment, photo or video posted on the social network. Internet.org, the free Web access initiative for emerging markets, has a widely used Free Basics app, which has already sparked protests in India for being too Facebook-centric. “Our community continued to grow and our business is thriving”. And this figure was up more than 50% on past year.
Dominance of Facebook in mobile advertising assisted to allay Wall Street disquiets over its heavy investments in messaging service virtual reality unit Oculus and WhatsApp, which have not yet produced profits. The Financial Times reports that Facebook’s share price rallied seven per cent in the immediate aftermath of the announcement, as its performance in mobile advertising surpassed earlier analyst expectations.
Here are some charts from a new set of stats released by Mark Zuckerberg for you to have a look, at the sheer, gargantuan amount of progress Facebook is making, and how it is virtually eating up the internet.
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The better-than-expected results are thought to be because of new advertising formats and an improved mobile app which led to a sharp rise in ad sales.
