Facebook shares surge 12 percent with jump in revenue

EMarketer predicted Facebook will capture one in every five mobile-advertising dollars in the United States this year and that Instagram will make up 20 percent of Facebook’s revenue from mobile devices.

The company’s total revenue rose to $5.84 billion from $3.85 billion a year earlier, with ad revenue increasing 56.8 per cent to $5.64 billion in the Christmas shopping period.

The healthy revenues are matched by a strong profits for the fourth quarter and the full year of $1.5bn and $3.6bn respectively.

“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 now has a user base of almost 1.6 billion.

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.

The results easily beat the analyst estimates of 68 cents per share on revenue of $5.37 billion.

There’s nothing bad that can be said about Facebook’s Q4 financials, and even previous areas of concern, such as expenditure growing faster that revenue has been finally addressed, as can be seen in the remarkable chart above which shows that the amount Facebook is spending as a percentage of revenue continues to decline. Currently, 2.5 million active advertisers are working with Facebook. 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.

Facebook said it had 1.59-billion monthly active users as of December 31, up 14% from the end of 2014. You’d be forgiven for thinking Facebook’s “mobile problem” was eons ago, when in reality it was only a little more than a handful of quarters ago.

Facebook, continues to climb higher and break records and by that means, breaking financial records. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions.

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

As a result, Facebook shares popped in the after-market following the earnings report, and are now a shade under 5 percent higher than the regular Wednesday trading close.

Furthermore, Parse.ly also made a graph that compared the referral traffic between the two back in December 2015, where Facebook passed Google’s figures.