Facebook continues to make most of its money from mobile
Facebook's bet on mobile continues to pay off in absolute spades. The first quarterly earnings report of the year from Zuckerberg and crew lay testament to that, showing that a whopping 73 percent of its $3.32 billion in ad revenue now comes from mobile alone (Total revenue for the quarter was $3.54 billion). Its number of mobile users is also on the rise -- out of Facebook's 1.44 billion monthly active users,1.25 billion are on mobile, which is up 24 percent from this time last year. Perhaps more impressive is that the number of daily users -- ie. its most engaged audience -- has gone up as well; 936 million people visit Facebook everyday, with 798 million of them logging in from their phones.
Facebook's other properties saw growth as well: Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp now have around 300 million, 600 million and 800 million users respectively. Zuckerberg said on the earnings call that people are sharing content with greater frequency, adding that around 45 billion messages are sent everyday on Messenger. He also said that VOIP is an avenue for growth, especially as WhatsApp has recently brought voice calls to its iOS app. Zuckerberg added that Messenger, which also lets you make voice calls, apparently accounts for 10 percent of global VOIP.
The growth in mobile is particularly noteworthy as the company shifts toward more standalone apps, like today's release of Facebook Hello. Also don't expect video ads to go away any time soon; Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, says that Facebook has about 4 billion video views a day. As for Facebook's longer term projects like Internet.org and Oculus Rift, quite a bit of its recent uptick in revenue is going to funding those and more: the company spent over $1 billion in research and development expenses this past quarter.
[Image credit: PL Images/Alamy]
