“The quarter was a great quarter nearly any way you look at it”, David Wehner, Facebook’s CFO, told CNBC after the earnings came out. Still, the company’s stock fell during after-hours trading.
Facebook said it had 1.49 billion monthly active users as of June 30, up 13 percent from a year earlier. Some 844 million of these were mobile DAUs, an increase of 29 percent year over year. “We’re seeing strong growth in brand, in direct response, in [small- and medium-sized business] and in developers”, Ms. Sandberg said.
Zuckerberg said that as revenue from mobile advertising rose, to become 76% of total revenue, desktop ad revenue declined 8%, led by a 55% drop in ad impressions served.
In contrast to rivals like Twitter, the Facebook social network has also managed to keep drawing in new users and getting them to come back frequently.
“This quarter was our fastest community growth we’ve had in two years”, said Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg in an interview with Ad Age before the company’s earnings call on Wednesday afternoon. The company pulled in $3.82 billion in ad revenue, up from $2.67 billion during the same period a year ago. “There are a lot of public figures who have pages, often with millions or tens of millions of followers, producing unique and really high-quality content that they are pushing out to all their fans on the network today”.
But the company made less money than it did a year earlier, with net income falling by almost 10% to $719 million.
Facebook like other global companies was hurt by the rising dollar, saying that revenues would have been up 50 per cent without the impact of currency changes.
Wall Street was looking for earnings of 47 cents per share with $3.99 billion in revenue. Facebook EPS growth is seen averaging just under 28 percent annually over the next five years. The company generated US$4.04 billion in revenue in Q2, compared to US$2.91 billion during the same quarter a year ago.
Around 700m people now use Messenger to contact friends, and the app has been downloaded more than 1bn times on Android’s operating system. “We’re very excited about the video ad product, and it’s making a real contribution”.
Facebook has posted revenues of $4.04bn for the second quarter of its financial year, a huge increase on the $2.91bn posted in the same period last year.
Video’s becoming a key draw for people on Facebook. That means the company is now serving half the Internet universe with cute animal videos, dancing kids and updates on its users.
“There’s always a richer way that people want to share and consume thoughts and feelings”, said Zuckerberg.
