Facebook’s quarterly revenue has surpassed $5 billion (AU$7.09 billion) for the first time.
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Chairman and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who returned from two months of paternity leave on Monday, has said virtual reality represents the next major computing platform. The company also said it is has 1.04 billion daily active users – up 17 percent – and 934 million daily active mobile users, which is up 25 percent from past year.
The healthy revenues are matched by a strong profits for the fourth quarter and the full year of $1.5bn and $3.6bn respectively.
SAN FRANCISCO – 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.
Revenue in the quarter that ended December 31 also rose, to $5.84 billion from $3.85 billion during the same period a year earlier.
Mobile advertising continues to lead Facebook’s growth and accounted for 80 percent of ad revenue in the quarter, up from 69 percent of revenue from the same period the year before.
That’s still a lot of ground for Facebook to make up, but it’s not impossible, given the digital dossiers that it has compiled about its users’ passions, friendships and other services that they visit while signed into the social-networking service. Both top- and bottom-line results utterly crushed the consensus estimates of $5.4 billion in sales and $0.68 per share in adjusted earnings.
This combination of user numbers and data is why Facebook is predicted to capture more than 30% of total display ad spending in the USA this year, according to eMarketer.
However, the way people are using Facebook is changing.
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. While other companies are trying to focus on growth and figure out the monetization engine later, Facebook’s focus has to be improving its advertising products – which it appears to be succeeding in thus far.
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Instagram also appears to have much more room for growth in the future. Revenue from Asia jumped 19 percent from the prior quarter to $846 million, accelerating from an increase of 14 percent in the third quarter.
