Facebook earnings fall 9 percent

This means that despite a 39 per cent year-on-year revenue increase – for a total of over $4 billion – Facebook’s overall profits suffered a 9.1 per cent loss, coming out at $719 million.

Facebook tapped into an additional $1 billion in ad revenue during the second quarter compared to a year ago, with mobile’s percentage topping 75 percent for the first time as big brands followed consumers to where they are increasingly spending their time.

The bulk of the revenue growth was driven by mobile advertising, which accounted for a staggering 76 percent of all advertising revenue in the quarter, up from 64 percent in the same period past year.

Facebook continued to extend its range, surpassing 1.49 billion monthly active users, representing a rise of 13 percent from previous year.

Facebook Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has outlined the current state of the company along with COO, Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Wehner. Some 844 million of these were mobile DAUs, an increase of 29 percent year over year.

Facebook shares fell 5 per cent in after-hours trading after the announcement. In April, the company revealed that Facebook viewers were watching 4 billion videos a day on average, after reaching 3 billion at the end of past year. Of that, $3.8 billion came from advertising revenue specifically, with an ever-growing number of those ad impressions and clicks happening on our smartphones.

Mr Zuckerberg said the costs reflected “ongoing investments and improvements” it had made, such as its new data centre in Texas, which had helped reduced crashes on the network. In fact, Facebook has been picking up older users faster than it has attracted younger people, but that’s another story.

On Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality business, Zuckerberg said that “immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing” after video.

Net income plummeted to $715 million, or 25 cents a share, as compared to $788 million, or 30 cents a share one year ago.

Facebook’s total costs and expenses jumped 82 percent to 2.77 billion dollars in the three months ending June 30, driven in large part by stock compensation linked to its multi-billion-dollar acquisition of WhatsApp.

The stock closed at $96.99 on Wednesday and slipped by around 2% after the news.

While still far behind No. 1 Google Inc., Facebook has been steadily growing its share of the worldwide digital advertising market.

Curiously, Facebook didn’t share any new metrics around its daily video views.