With strong quarter growth, Facebook hits 1.71 billion monthly users

Now, considering that Facebook has over 1.57 billion mobile users and 1.03 billion of them are active users, this means that approximately 65.6% of the company’s total mobile users use the social media daily. Over the next three years, it will focus on continuing to grow its massive user base, especially in developed nations, and over the next 10 years it will look to build new technology to get more people online and using Facebook through internet-beaming drones.

“Facebook has shown that you can be a giant and you can be innovative”, told analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy to Reuters.

“The scale we’ve achieved with messaging services makes clear that this is more than just a way to chat with friends”, said Zuckerberg, “which is why we are making it easier to connect with groups and businesses as well”.

Mobile advertising made up 84% of Facebook’s ad revenue in the second quarter up from 76% past year.

Facebook said it had more than one billion daily active users on mobile at the end of the quarter June 30, up 22 per cent from a year ago. Mobile ad revenue passed the $5 billion mark ($5.2 billion) for the first time, and accounted for 81% of total ad revenue. “We’re particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services”.

Wall Street’s reaction to the positive earnings was a 7.5% bump in after hours trading to USD$132.60 (£100.58).

There were critics, however, BI reports – including academic Zeynep Tufekci, who argued the research was conducted on “a small, skewed subset of Facebook users”.

Although Twitter’s advertising revenue was up 18% to $535m, analysts said the company will find it hard to attract advertisers without stronger growth in the number of users.

Facebook-owned Instagram has now reached 500 million users.

“If users don’t understand why they’re seeing certain posts and not others, and how the decisions of Facebook’s algorithms can shape the civic discourse, then that’s a problem”. Facebook’s second-quarter earnings per share are $0.97, compared to expectations of only $0.82.

Facebook’s shares on Thursday rose as much as four per cent to $128.33, boosting its market value by $14 billion to $367 billion – enough to eclipse Berkshire’s market cap of about $355 billion. Its total revenue soared 59 percent to 6.44 billion dollars, above analysts’ estimated average of 6.02 billion dollars.