Facebook Users Cross Billion Threshold As Mobile Ads Grow

Facebook has pleased Wall Street after its financials displayed impressive growth once again, coupled with a steep rise in daily active users (DAUs).

The social network revealed that it saw 1.01 billion DAUs on average during September, an increase of 17 percent year-over-year.

That comes after Facebook hailed that more than one billion people had accessed Facebook in August, which meant that one in seven people across the world logged into the social network.

Ad Lifeblood

And it is clear that mobile continues to be a sweet spot for Facebook after it revealed that mobile DAUs had risen 27 percent year-on-year to 894 million on average for September.

There was also an equally pleasing financial performance for the social network.

For the third quarter ending September 30, Facebook posted a net profit of $896m (£583m) from $806m (£524m) in the previous year.

Revenue also rose to $4.5bn (£2.9bn) from $3.2bn (£2.1bn) a year earlier. Analysts had expected revenue of $4.37bn (£2.8bn).

Advertising is the lifeblood of Facebook after it attributed $ 4.3bn (£2.8bn) of the overall sales to ads – a 45 percent increase year-on-year.

Facebook said that mobile advertising revenue represented a staggering 78 percent of advertising revenue for the third quarter of 2015, up from 66 percent of advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2014

“We had a good quarter and got a lot done,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “We’re focused on innovating and investing for the long term to serve our community and connect the entire world.”

Shares in Facebook rose about 5 percent to an all-time high of $109.34 (£71.09) in extended trading.

Other key performance indicators saw Instagram gaining more than 400 million monthly active users, and WhatsApp passing the 900 million mark.

Going Forward

Financials and customer numbers aside, Facebook is facing a few challenges at the moment.

Last month Facebook admitted that it was looking at ways to improve the performance of its iOS app after receiving a large number of user complaints about excessive battery drain.

And Facebook is also stuck firmly in the middle of the fallout over the Safe Harbour data sharing agreement between the United States and Europe.

The Irish data protection watchdog confirmed last month it would begin an official investigation into Facebook’s data transfers to the US.

That decision came after Europe’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) suspended the so-called Safe Harbour agreement that had allowed data-sharing between the EU and the US for the past 15 years.

Ireland is leading Europe’s response to the court decision as Facebook’s EU headquarters is in Dublin. This fact prompted Austrian lawyer Max Schrems to bring his data privacy case in late 2012 against Facebook to the Irish data protection watchdog.

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