Facebook ended the financial year strongly as the social network reported revenue of more than 5.8 billion USA dollars (£4.07bn) for the final three months of 2015.
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It expected Facebook to bring in $9.86 billion in U.S. display ad revenue this year, capturing 30.6 percent of the money spent on those types of ads in the country.
Zuckerberg said Facebook’s engineers still need to make a few more “tweaks” before the new options are offered in other parts of the world. Mobile ads now account for four-fifths of advertising revenue.
Facebook’s buoyant results are in contrast to the woes of fellow tech giant Apple which – despite posting record quarterly profits of $18.4bn- saw shares plunge as it saw a sharp slowdown in sales growth of its iPhones and forecast a fall in volumes for the current period.
Facebook-owned Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012, is also seeing strong traction.
Daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.04 billion on average for December 2015, an increase of 17% year-over-year.
Its mobile strength helped offset concerns about Facebook’s big bets on other services like Whatsapp and virtual reality, divisions that are yet to turn a profit.
Facebook smashed investors’ expectations with a 52% jump in quarterly revenue as it sold more ads targeted at a fast-growing number of mobile users, sending its shares sharply higher after hours.
Many Facebook users have been calling for a “dislike” button for years. At a town hall meeting in November 2014, he predicted, “In five years, most of [Facebook] will be video”.
After returning from a two-month paternity leave, CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined some of those plans.
More and more people are engaging on Facebook whenever and wherever they like.
Facebook (FB – Get Report) is an absolute advertising monster, with 1.59 billion people using it every month.
“Certainly economic uncertainty in the broad macroeconomic environment affects all businesses, it affects our clients, it affects us, but that said we think we’re really well positioned to continue to take advantage of and double down on the shift to mobile which is happening”, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said.
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Zuckerberg went on to discuss providing people with better tools for sharing content, improving Facebook’s capabilities to serve different communities and optimising the company’s services for people in developing countries.
