Facebook’s revenue beats expectations as mobile drives ad sales

Total revenues of the company advanced from $3.85 billion to $5.84 billion, with ad revenue growing 56.8% to $5.64 billion in the period holiday shopping season, when expenditure on advertising characteristically spikes.

Those numbers, are up from 1.55 billion users and $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter, and have beaten the $5.3 Billion revenue estimate and the 68 cents earnings per share estimates of the Wall street. Mobile also continues to be the main way most people browse the world’s most popular social network, with 1.44 billion people using Facebook on a monthly basis.

Facebook said late Wednesday that mobile ads accounted for 80% of Total ad revenue in the quarter, compared with about 78% in the third quarter and 69% a year earlier.

“Our community continued to grow and our business is thriving”, said Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in releasing quarterly results for the world’s biggest social network which comfortably exceeded expectations. “In 2016 and beyond, we’re going to continue…serving our community, working to bring connectivity to billions of people who’re not yet connected, and building new technologies that give people more ways to express themselves”.

Taken as a whole, Facebook’s fourth quarter and full 2015 results were a show of strength for the business. This was slower than past year.

Twitter also has been considering making major changes to its core product by expanding the number of characters users have available for tweets, from 140 to 10,000.

According to CNBC, Facebook posted record for both revenue and earnings in the fourth quarter.

Facebook’s quarterly revenue has surpassed $5 billion (AU$7.09 billion) for the first time.

The key monthly active users metric rose by 14% to 1.59 billion users.

The performance lifted Facebook’s stock by $11.37, or 12 per cent, to $105.82 in extended trading after the report came out. On top of all of this, Mark Zuckerberg has announced he wants to program a custom A.I. to up Facebook’s position in that sector.

Ken Sena, analyst at Evercore ISI, said: “It’s much stronger ad growth than we were expecting”.

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. He specifically pointed to video as an “important part of the Facebook experience” and said that 100 million hours of video are watched daily on the social network.