Facebook beats expectations as mobile drives ad sales, shares soar

In a statement, Facebook co-founder and CEO Marc Zuckerberg said, “Our community continues to grow and our business is thriving”.

Fourth-quarter sales rose to $5.84 billion, exceeding the $5.37 billion average analyst projection, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

80 percent of revenue in the all ad segment came in from Mobile advertising compared to about 69 percent in the year-ago period. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Well, not only has Facebook managed to keep adding new people to its network (there are now 1.59 billion people who use the site each month), it’s actually making more money off each user at the same time.

At the news of Facebook’s big earnings upswing, shares boomed by more than 13 per cent. The company’s net value is now well in excess of $250 billion (as per the Telegraph).

This was the first time Facebook had posted results of more than a billion dollars in a single quarter. Each one has a corresponding emoji-style face and will appear underneath posts made to the social network, which users can then click.

Revenue – Revenue for the full year 2015 was $17.93 billion, an increase of 44% year-over-year. That amount may not sound like much, but consider the fact that as of last quarter, there were over 1.5 billion active users worldwide.

Apart from focusing on mobile, Facebook has been ramping up spending on what it calls “big bets”, including virtual reality, artificial intelligence and drones to connect the remotest parts of the world to the internet.

“We’ve seen strong brand performance on Instagram, with a majority of our brand partners moving spend to the platform, some significantly”, said Max Kalehoff, chief marketing officer of Facebook marketing partner SocialCode.

Mobile user growth helped Facebook turn in impressive results for the quarter.

Facebook’s growth was fueled by its online advertising growth, which targeted its hefty number of mobile users.

Advertising came in at $5.6 billion for the quarter, also beating the $5.2 billion predicted by analysts, and up 57 percent from $3.6 billion from Q4 2014. This ARPU figure is extremely important to keep high, since Facebook’s new user growth is starting to reach saturation and could slow down significantly very soon.