Facebook: Mobile ads make up 53% of total ad revenue New Facebook delivers its strongest revenue growth in 2 years, beating Wall Street targets 9571394695242922.JPEG Michael Goodwin, senior Partner for HTC, displays an HTC First cell phone wit the new Facebook interface at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. (AP) REUTERS Published — Thursday 30 January 2014 Last update 30 January 2014 1:04 pm Facebook: Mobile ads make up 53% of total ad revenue New Facebook delivers its strongest revenue growth in 2 years, beating Wall Street targets 9571394695242922.JPEG Michael Goodwin, senior Partner for HTC, displays an HTC First cell phone wit the new Facebook interface at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. (AP) REUTERS Published — Thursday 30 January 2014 Last update 30 January 2014 1:04 pm | نسخة PDF Send to Friend Print News | A A LATEST STORIES IN ECONOMY Oman telco Nawras Q4 profit falls 3% Google to sell Motorola unit to Lenovo for $2.91bn Saudi telecom sector records SR14.8 billion profit in 2013 NCB seeks to raise capital to SR20 billion SAMBA to increase capital to SR12bn More RELATED STORIES 1 million fans following BRJ page on Facebook #Saudi Arabia world’s 2nd most Twitter-happy nation British Council’s page ‘Learn English’ a hit on Facebook Before Facebook, there was Manet, painting friends Saudis love Twitter, for sure! SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook Inc. delivered its strongest revenue growth in two years, beating Wall Street targets as the Internet company’s mobile ad sales continued to accelerate. Shares of Facebook surged 12 percent to $59.98 in after-hours trading. The world’s largest social networking company said that revenue from mobile ads represented 53 percent of its total advertising revenue in the last three months of the year, or $1.24 billion, versus the 49 percent proportion that mobile ads represented in the third quarter. “They’ve cracked the code on mobile,” said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne, Agee & Leach. “Within a little over a year’s time mobile has taken over desktop,” in terms of ad revenue he said. Facebook said it now has 1.23 billion monthly users, with 945 million accessing the service on a smartphone or tablet. Facebook’s newsfeed ads, which inject paid marketing messages straight into a user’s stream of news and content, have boosted Facebook’s revenue and its stock price in recent months. The ads are ideally suited for the smaller-sized screens of smartphones and other mobile devices. The average price per ad on Facebook has surged 92 percent in the past year, the company said, even as the total number of ad impressions on Facebook declined 8 percent. In a conference call with analysts, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the focus going forward was to improve the quality and the relevance of the newsfeed ads, rather than boosting the amount of ads in users’ newsfeed. Among the other priorities for the coming year, Zuckerberg said the company would focus on creating new standalone products and on improving Facebook’s nascent search product. Facebook had spooked some investors in October when it said that it noticed a decrease in daily users among “younger teens.” The remarks raised fears that teen Facebook users might be drifting to new messaging services such as Snapchat and WhatsApp. Facebook Finance Chief David Ebersman said the company did not have an update to share about teen usage during the quarter, though the company noted that overall user “engagement” had increased throughout 2013. Roughly 61.5 percent of Facebook’s 1.23 billion monthly users visited the site every day in the fourth quarter, an increase from the 58.3 percent ration in the fourth quarter of 2012. “The engagement on their site is going up and they’re recapturing people on Instagram, so they’re not losing people,” said Jefferies analyst Brian Pitz, referring to the Facebook-owned mobile photo-sharing service. Overall revenue in the fourth quarter rose to $2.585 billion, compared with $1.585 billion in the year-ago period and above the $2.33 billion expected by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Ebersman said that expenses in the coming year would likely increase around 35 percent to 40 percent. He did not provide a revenue forecast for 2014. Facebook reported net income of $523 million, or 20 cents a share, versus $64 million or 3 cents a share in the year-ago period. Excluding certain items, Facebook said it earned 31 cents a share, beating the 27 cents per share that analysts were expecting.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 10:18:11 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015