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Facebook Beats Q3 Earnings Expectations With Help From Mobile Ad Sales

Per usual, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered little insight in the earnings release: “We had a good quarter and got a lot done”, he says.

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Three years ago, Facebook didn’t really have a mobile business. Those views come from the 500 million users who are watching videos every day.

That comes after Facebook hailed that more than one billion people had accessed Facebook in August, which meant that one in seven people across the world logged into the social network.

Facebook’s growth has been steady: The company has gained about the same percentage of new users in each of the past four quarters. In comparison, Twitter has only 320 million users. There were 1.55 billion individual visits during September, 1.39 billion of which were on mobile devices.

$4.501 billion in total revenue during the quarter, a 40.5% increase from $3.203 billion in the same quarter of 2014.

However, analysts were expecting earnings of $0.52 per share on revenue of $4.37 billion.

Facebook is expected to capture 17.4% of the global total mobile-ad market, which is projected to reach as much as $72.1 billion this year, according to data from EMarketer. The Wall Street Journal reports that an RBC Capital Markets survey shows 61 percent of marketers are planning to boost spending on Facebook next year.

Yet another area where Facebook saw strong growth was in messaging.

Monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 1.55 billion as of September 30, 2015, an increase of 14% year-over-year.

Facebook has said in the past it planned to grow advertising revenue on Instagram and Whatsapp organically, but investors have been anxious to see specific plans.

And Facebook is getting a lot better at monetizing all those mobile eyeballs: 78 per cent of Facebook’s ad revenue is for mobile ads.

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Advertising revenue, which accounts for the vast majority of Facebook’s sales, jumped 45% from the prior year to $4.3 billion.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a town hall-style meeting with Narendra Modi India's prime minister at Facebook headquarters in September