Mobile worth a friggin’ fortune for Facebook – revenue up 56%

Facebook really has got its skates on at the moment after announcing more seriously impressive growth numbers, powered by the rocket fuel that is mobile advertising.

It’s going to be high-fives, pay rises and pumpkin soy lattes all round for the clever dudes over at Menlo Park, as Facebook posted total revenue to $7 billion – up a ridiculous 56% year on year for Q3.

That’s a crazy level of growth, and even net income was up from $900 million to $2.4 billion. The reason for this? Mobile advertising of course, which has now taken another giant leap forward by representing 84% of all advertising revenues – which account for 97% of Facebook’s total revenues.

It’s no wonder advertising on mobile is now worth a friggin’ fortune for Facebook; as the internet giant posted operational highlights from the quarter too, with mobile daily active users up 22% year on year for September, to a whopping 1.1 billion.

Monthly users across all platforms are approaching the 2 billion mark now (1.79 billion to be precise), and mobile constitutes nearly 93% of all users on Facebook today. It’s doing a good job monetising it, but CFO Dave Wehner did make a point that supply and demand is nearing its limit; this ridiculous growth can’t go on forever. It shows that Facebook is capable of delivering something other than ridiculously good news – lukewarm at worst to be fair.

“I also wanted to provide some brief comments on 2017,” Wehner said, as everyone calmed down from the preceding giddy revenue announcements. “First on revenue, as I mentioned last quarter we continue to expect that ad load will play a less significant factor driving revenue growth after mid-2017. Over the past few years, we have averaged about 50% revenue growth in advertising. Ad load has been one of the three primary factors fuelling that growth. With a much smaller contribution from this important factor going forward, we expect to see ad revenue growth rates come down meaningfully.”

The news comes as Facebook prepares for another one of those political landmark moments. Next week’s US Election Day has been facilitated by Facebook for months, after it ran a campaign earlier in the year to make sure everyone registered to vote. It also live broadcasted the three presidential debates, to help make sure everyone is fully informed and up to date ahead of polling day.

Your correspondents at Telecoms.com always do their best to avoid social media during times of socio-political significance, as the level of hysteria surrounding elections (or Brexit) encourage the ill-informed-yet-stubbornly-opinionated among us out into the open to relentlessly insult the intelligence of anyone who vaguely disagrees with their hopelessly entrenched position.

Good luck with that next week, America.