Facebook had a really good first quarter

May 3, 2017 22:08 GMT  ·  By

Those who believed years ago that Facebook was destined to crash and burn are eating their words now. The company announced total revenues of over $8 billion, out of which ad revenue was $7.86 billion for the year's first quarter, as well as a 76.6% surge in quarterly profit to just over $3 billion. 

Facebook's 2017 has been great so far, with huge revenues and just as large profits. What's better for the company, however, is that 85% of its total advertising revenue came from mobile, up from 82% a year earlier. This goes to prove that the company can and will make a profit from its mobile venture, something that investors feared back before the company went public.

Research firm eMarketer reports that Facebook is expected to generate close to $32 billion in mobile ad revenue in 2017, which isn't a far-fetched number if the company keeps it up on this trend.

Next step - 2 billion MAU

Facebook's latest report further shows that the social network continues to be extremely popular, closing in on the next milestone - 2 billion monthly active users. Right now, the company states that it has 1.94 billion monthly active users, which is 17 percent higher than the same period of last year. Given how it is estimated that there are 7.5 billion people on the planet, that means that about a quarter of them are all on Facebook.

"We had a good start to 2017. We're continuing to build tools to support a strong global community," Zuckerberg told investors.

Earlier today, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be hiring an additional 3,000 people to handle reports of content across the platform, specifically video. The news comes after a wave of violence being broadcast live with the help of Facebook's Live Video feature. In the past weeks alone there have been several killings that took place on Live and the videos remained online for a while before being taken down. Zuckerberg did mention that they managed to save at least one life after someone reported a video of an individual contemplating suicide.