14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook managed to attract another 70 million users to sign in every month, pushing the number of monthly users to 1.86 billion. The company also attracted $8.81 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 2016.
According to Facebook’s latest quarterly results, the company now makes 84% of its ad revenue from its mobile app, which is pretty much the same as last quarter. It accounted for $7.24 billion of the total. The company also reported a profit of $3.56 billion, putting the growth at 177% year over year.
Revenue was up 51% year over year, down from 56% in the third quarter and 59% in the second quarter of 2016, indicating that the company’s revenue growth was indeed slowing down some. This has been something that Facebook warned about before, saying that it would run out of ad space somewhere in the middle of 2017. It seems that the slowdown is already having an impact. That’s not to say that Facebook will be making less money, just that it won’t grow quite as rapidly. This, of course, is normal considering that, even for a company as big as Facebook, there are some limitations regarding how much it can grow.
Growing user base
On the other hand, the number of daily active users has reached 1.23 billion, up from 1.18 billion in the previous quarter, indicating an 18% growth year over year. This is quite an important number and it shows us once more why Facebook is pretty much the only company that would share data regarding daily users and not just monthly, as everyone else.
“Facebook stands for connecting people and creating a global community, and in 2016 more people than ever made their voices heard. We saw billions of conversations about everything from important elections to the Olympics to breaking news stories around the world. And more people are taking advantage of new tools to connect and share on our family of apps - especially with video,” said Mark Zuckerberg during the conference call.
Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s plans to start putting video first, something that’s been rumored to happen as the company works on a set-top box app for video, both original content and content from the regular Facebook platform.
“We’re also improving live video as more people use it. New Year’s Eve was our biggest live moment ever, with more people going live than at any other time since we launched the product,” Zuck said. “We’re experimenting with live 360 video, audio-only live for people with slower connections, and live face masks and more camera effects and we’ll have more updates soon.”
The Facebook CEO also addressed the company’s battle against fake news which has gone rampant in recent months. Mark Zuckerberg said that they’re approaching misinformation and hoaxes in the same way they’ve approached reducing spam and clickbait. More specifically, they’ve started working with third-party fact checkers in the United States to flag disputed stories and make them less likely to appear in the News Feed.