It’s a big week for big-tech financial results, with Facebook the latest to declare its numbers last night. The social network reported Q2 revenues of $1.81bn, up 53% year-on-year, plus a net profit of $333m compared to a loss of $157m in Q2 2012.
Facebook ended the latest quarter with 1.15bn monthly active users and 699m daily active users, up 21% and 27% year-on-year respectively. 88% of Facebook’s revenues came from advertising, with more than 1m active advertisers on its network.
The big story for Facebook continues to be mobile, though: usage on smartphones and tablets has been rocketing for some time, but there have been lots of questions about whether Facebook can make money from it. The Q2 financials indicate that it can.
Facebook had 819m monthly active mobile users last quarter – 71% of all its active users – with 469m daily active mobile users. And mobile ads generated $656m of revenues for the quarter, which was 41% of Facebook’s overall advertising income.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was bullish in Facebook’s earnings call, telling analysts that the company isn’t suffering from competition from new mobile social networking services, particularly for teenagers.
“There has been a lot of speculation reporting that fewer teens are using Facebook. But based on our data, that just isn’t true,” he said. “We believe that we’re close to fully penetrated in the U.S. teen demographic for a while and the number of teens using Facebook on both a daily and monthly basis has been steady over the past year and half.”
Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg also promised to “invest more in improving the quality” of ads on Facebook, so users don’t get (more) antsy about seeing them; said that advertising on Instagram is “going to be a really big opportunity” (but won’t be introduced until “the right time comes”); and reiterated that Facebook is “exploring how we can expand” the use of video by advertisers on the social network, beyond brands simply embedding videos in their Page posts.
Nothing about music, but that’s not a big surprise. Facebook’s mobile growth, and what that means for the evolution of its service (including its ads) is something for rightsholders and digital music services alike to think more about, though.
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