Facebook is reporting another quarter of strong revenue and profit growth, with the former increasing 72 percent in the first quarter and net income nearly tripling.
Advertising grew at its strongest rate in three years for the social network, with 59 percent coming from mobile ads – double the level of a year ago.
Two out of three of Facebook’s 1.28 billion monthly users log in to the social network every day, the company said.
Americans spend about one-fifth of their time on mobile phones checking Facebook, according to comScore, a research firm.
So, the results show that Facebook is big on mobile. But messaging on Facebook is pretty big on mobile, too.
More than 200 million people are regularly using Facebook Messenger, the company’s mobile texting application for Android and iPhone, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company’s quarterly earnings conference call on Wednesday.
It’s the first time Facebook has broken out numbers for Messenger, which it often cites as one of the company’s most successful standalone apps.
And those numbers are destined to grow, as Facebook also announced that it will be ripping the Messaging feature out of its smartphone apps in the coming weeks, asking people to instead download the standalone app in the future.
Therefore, if you want to message people on Facebook from a smartphone, you’ll soon be forced to download its messenger app.
Zuckerberg also said it would be a couple of years before Facebook tried to make serious money from its other apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp (another messaging service that Facebook bought for $19 billion). The company also recently acquired Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset manufacturer.
Zuckerberg said he would prefer to first focus on increasing the number of people using each service.
“We believe these apps have a lot of room to grow and will start to be important businesses in the future, but monetisation isn’t our near-term priority,” he said.
Facebook had revenue of $2.5 billion in the quarter, up from the $1.46 billion it reported in the same quarter last year. The company’s net income was $642 million, or 25 cents a share, up sharply from $219 million, or 9 cents a share, last year.
Excluding certain expenses, including stock-based compensation costs, Facebook had a profit of $885 million, or 34 cents a share, for the quarter. On that basis, analysts had expected the company to have a profit of 24 cents a share on revenue of $2.36 billion.
For the last two years, Facebook has been growing in mobile advertising, gaining ground against Google, its chief rival. Mobile was 59 percent of advertising revenue in the quarter, up from 30 percent a year ago.
Facebook accounted for 17.5 percent of the $18 billion spent on mobile ads worldwide last year, compared with a 49.3 percent share for Google, according to the research firm eMarketer.
This year, eMarketer predicts, advertisers will spend much more on mobile ads – nearly $32 billion globally – and Facebook will take 21.7 percent of the market. Google’s share is expected to drop to 47 percent.
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