In this guest post, editor of business site www.which-50.com, Andrew Birmingham, crunches Facebook’s latest numbers – particularly around mobile – and argues the social media juggernaut shows no sign of slowing down yet…
The majority of Facebook’s 1.6 billion monthly unique users now access the social network exclusively on mobile.
The data is found in Facebooks Q4 report which reveals that 52 per cent of its monthly active users were mobile only.
It is little wonder then that mobile is the key source of Facebook’s revenue, accounting for over 80 per cent of the pie, although its possible this may reflect internal accounting methods as much as anything. (Due to the way the ads are optimised and served the distinctions between desktop and mobile adds will soon be rendered meaningless, at least in terms of attributing revenue.)
A few more bon mots from the Facebook investor pack. The company continues to add to its impressive Daily Active User count. It first burst through the billion user mark in Q3 and managed to add another three points in the final quarter of the year.
And there is a remarkable consistency to the numbers. Daily average users as a percentage of monthly average users sits a 65 per cent. And this engagement is increasing over time.
All of which eventually turns into dollars in the till. In case you missed the news in late January, Zuckerberg’s Curse raked in $5.8 billion for the quarter, up from $3.3 billion a year ago. ARPU (Average revenue per user) is also growing strongly up from $2.5 to $3.73 on a year. That growth is driven by ad spend in developed markets like the US and Canada.
With the company still building out its sales infrastructure globally the outlook remains an absurdly positive one for Facebook.
