Facebook’s quarterly earnings surpass $5bn for first time thanks to ad sales

Total revenue rose 52% to $5.84bn from $3.85bn a year earlier, with ad revenue jumping 57% to $5.64bn in the holiday shopping period, when spending on advertising typically increases.

Facebook said it had 1.59 billion monthly active users as of 31 December, up 14 per cent from the end of 2014.

The company also said that 80% of its advertising revenue in that period came from mobile advertising, up from 69% a year earlier. “2015 was a great year for Facebook”, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated.

On a call with investors, Zuckerberg also revealed that 800 million people now use its Messenger service, and it plans to expand its WhatsApp messaging platform to let users communicate with businesses.

Facebook, the world’s biggest social-media service, keeps growing bigger as the company blew past Wall Street financial forecasts for the fourth quarter of 2015.

The jump in shares was set to add almost $33 billion to Facebook’s market value, putting the company on track to re-enter the $300 billion club.

And of course, this is a remarkable increase in the advertising revenue for Facebook. The number of daily users on mobile devices rose a stronger 25 percent to 934 million.

Monthly active users (MAUs): 1.59 billion, an increase of 21% year-over-year – vs. expectations of 1.58 billion. Internet.org, the free Web access initiative for emerging markets, has a widely used Free Basics app, which has already sparked protests in India for being too Facebook-centric.

“Certainly economic uncertainty in the broad macroeconomic environment affects all businesses, it affects our clients, it affects us, but that said we think we’re really well positioned to continue to take advantage of and double down on the shift to mobile which is happening”, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said.

For the year as a whole, Facebook sales hit almost $18 billion, up from around $12 billion in the year prior. “As someone who is in Facebook every single day running ads I knew mobile was going to be big for them”, said Molly McCarty, 3Q Digital, a digital marketing company.

Facebook shares closed Wednesday down almost 3 percent, or $2.89, to $94.45. Instagram has more than 400 million users.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook reported growth in its active user base.

At least 22 brokerages raised price targets on Facebook’s stock, with most analysts focusing on a far better-than-expected the 81 percent jump in revenue from mobile ads.