Facebook has reported a 55.8 per cent rise in quarterly revenue, beating analysts' estimates, as its mobile-advertising sales soared.
Mobile ad revenue accounted for 84 percent of Facebook’s total advertising revenue of $6.82 billion in the third quarter ending September 30th, compared with 78 per cent a year earlier.
Analysts on average had expected total ad revenue of $6.71 billion, according to research firm FactSet StreetAccount.
Facebook, whose shares were up 1 per cent at $128.35 in after-hours trading, said about 1.79 billion people were using its site monthly as of September 30th, up 16 per cent from a year earlier.
More than 90 per cent of Facebook’s users access the social network through mobile devices. Mobile daily average users rose 22 per cent to 1.09 billion.
Total revenue rose to $7.01 billion from $4.50 billion, compared with the average estimate of $6.92 billion, according to Thomson Reuters IBES.
"We're making progress putting video first across our apps and executing our 10 year technology roadmap," chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
Photo-sharing app
With the company’s photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger facing increasing competition from Snapchat, Facebook has been adding features to keep users hooked and attract advertisers.
The company said in September that Instagram’s advertising base had more than doubled to more than 500,000 in six months. Instagram had about 500 million users as of June.
Facebook took its attempts to boost user engagement to the workplace last month, launching a subscription-based enterprise version of its mobile app.
The company also launched Marketplace, a feature that allows people to buy and sell items locally, and has been focusing more on video to better compete with Google’s Youtube.
Facebook is expected to generate about $22 billion in mobile ad revenue in 2016, according to research firm eMarketer, up about 67 per cent from 2015. Total ad revenue is forecast to rise to about $26billion, an increase of about 52 per cent.
However, there are questions about how long Facebook can continue to boost mobile ad revenue, given limits to the number of ads that Facebook can show each user.
– (Reuters)
