Facebook earnings boom with huge growth in mobile ad revenue after Twitter disappoints
Facebook has posted impressive third quarter results with growth in both revenue and users.
The multi-billion dollar company grew its daily active users by 19 per cent from a year ago, with the number of monthly active users growing by 14 per cent.
Wall Street had expected the social media firm to post revenue for the third quarter of $3.1bn up from $2bn last year. However, Facebook did one better reporting revenue of $3.2bn (£1.98bn) a 59 per cent increase.
Profit soared 90 per cent from the same quarter last year to reach $806m (£500m). Perhaps some of the most welcome results will be the number of mobile daily active users, which has risen to 1.12bn reflecting the massive rise in smartphones.
Mobile ad revenues contributed 66 per cent of all ad revenue, up from 49 per cent the same time last year. Mobile ad revenues are seen as key to the future success of the company. When Facebook made its debut on the US stock market two years ago mobile ads raked in relatively trivial sums.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO commented:
This has been a good quarter with strong results.
We continue to focus on serving our community well and continue to invest in connecting the world over the next decade.
Despite beating analysts' expectations markets had expected a stornger performance and shares in Facebook dropped eight per cent in after-hours trading.
On Monday, rival social media giant Twitter posted an underwhelming set of results, with timeline views per user, which measures engagement dropped seven per cent globally to 636 in the third quarter.
Twitter reported 284m active users – a 23 per cent increase from the same period in 2013 but only a five per cent increase from the second quarter of 2014.