Revenue jumped to $US4.50 billion in the third quarter, from $US3.20 billion a year earlier. Analysts had expected the company to deliver earnings per share of 52 cents on $4.37 billion in revenue. Net income attributable to stockholders rose to $891 million, from $802 million.
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The stock rose about 5 percent to an all-time high of $109.34 in extended trading on Wednesday, before paring gains to about 2 percent. Still, the company needs to be watchful.
Although, the increase in its user base came from a spike in mobile subscribers, a majority of the new users came from outside North America and Europe, which account for most of its revenues.
Total costs and expenses surged 68 percent to $3.04 billion, as Facebook increased its spending on research and development as well as on marketing.
Facebook said messaging service WhatsApp has more than 900 million monthly users and cross-platform Messenger texting service has topped 700 million MAUs. The company attributed this to adding many new users in the developing world. Facebook first broke the 1 billion monthly user barrier towards the end of August this year.
Daily active users (DAUs) were 1.01bn on average during September 2014, out of which 894m were mobile daily users.
Ad revenue grew 45.4 percent to $4.30 billion, with 78 percent of that coming from mobile versus 66 percent in the year-ago quarter. Mobile daily actives are up 27 per cent compared to past year. “We’ve made a lot of investments in our ad business, and those investments are really paying off”, COO Sheryl Sandberg told CNBC.
“It already is one of the biggest advertising markets that we have”. We’re able to target, we’re able to measure. “We have broad scale”.
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That is why Internet connectivity is a huge priority for the Indian government, “and anything we can do to help there, we think it’s very good for the world, and we’re invested in that and we’re happy to support”. Zuckerberg said on Facebook’s earnings call that the social network now serves 8 billion video views every day, although it bears remembering that Facebook’s autoplay counts as little as three seconds as a view.
