Facebook crushes earnings again and hits a billion daily active users on mobile

The news comes courtesy of its latest earnings report, released by the Menlo Park company on Wednesday.

For starters, just take a look at its monthly active users for the quarter ending June 30. There’s now 1.71 billion of them globally, marking an increase of 15 percent on the same three-month period a year earlier.

Mobile, however, is where Facebook has made the most gains. The site now entertains 1.57 billion monthly active users on handsets and tablets – that’s 20 percent more than a year ago.

But check this out – for the first time, its daily active user base for mobile has crossed the 1 billion mark. That’s right, every day, around the world, 1.03 billion people are logging onto Facebook via their handset or tablet, helped in some part by the growing popularity of its Facebook Lite app in developing countries. And that number takes on even greater significance when you discover that, for this latest quarter, mobile ad revenue accounted for a whopping 84 percent of its total revenue, up 8 percent on a year ago.

Big revenue, big profit

The company raked in $6.44 billion in revenue over its most recent three-month period, leading to a tidy $2.05 billion profit, a significant increase on the $719 million profit it pulled in a year ago.

Daring to state the obvious, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said in a release, “Our community and business had another good quarter,” adding, “We’re particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services.”

This certainly isn’t first time Zuckerberg has mentioned his plan to bring more video to the platform. Indeed, the company has, over the last couple of years, made a number of moves in that direction, adamant it’ll please not only users but, more importantly, advertisers too.

Pokémon Go

During an earnings call on Wednesday, the Zuck even managed to squeeze in a reference to Pokémon Go, the augmented reality (AR) game that’s taken the world by storm in recent weeks. Confirming that he sees AR as playing an important role in Facebook’s future, the CEO let the world know that he, “like everyone else,” is “enjoying Pokémon Go.”

Zuckerberg added that “more of these augmented-reality tools, I think, are going to be more of an important part of delivering that experience and making [Facebook] fun to use and as expressive as it can be.”

Editors' Recommendations

• Zuckerberg defends Facebook’s misinformation and hate policies in earnings call
• The EU could hit Facebook with billions in fines over privacy violations