Almost one in three Facebook users access the social media site only on their mobile phones
Facebook has just revealed a bumper earnings report once again, topping analyst estimates for the ninth consecutive quarter.
While the topline figures are no doubt impressive, featuring a jump in revenue, net income, earnings per share and advertising revenue, delving deeper into the numbers demonstrates how mobile is the motor behind Facebook's growth and that will have given shareholders a real lift.
Facebook accounted for a 5.8 per cent share of worldwide digital advertising revenues in 2013, an increase from 4.1 per cent from a year before that. But the company's share of the ad market is set to reach almost eight per cent by the end of 2014, according to data from research firm eMarketer.
Facebook continued to add to its daily active users over the three months to June. On a daily basis, there were 829m active users on average for June 2014, an increase of 19 per cent year on year. But mobile daily active users soared 39 per cent from the same period last year, reaching 654m.
But perhaps more interestingly, in its second quarter earnings, the social media giant revealed that it has 399m mobile-only monthly active users, those who accessed the social media site exclusively via a mobile device. Those numbers means that mobile-only users make up just below one in three of its active user base, which climbed to 1.3bn in June.
As the chart shows, the California-based firm added 58m mobile-only users in the three months from April to June. Taking into account that the social network added 41m overall users, the trend away from desktop and into mobile is apparent.
As well as that, mobile users in general, not necessarily mobile-only users, rose by 251m to 1.1bn.
With mobile advertising revenue representing approximately 62 per cent of Facebook's advertising revenue for the second quarter of 2014, up from 41 per cent in the year-before quarter, the expansion of its mobile only base could be a crucial factor as to why the company's shares are soaring to their all-time high of $75 in after hours trading.