Beating all analysts and experts’ estimates, Facebook posted blockbuster growth for the sixth straight quarter. It has earned USD 7.01 billion in revenue. In comparison to the growth of 3.63 percent in Q2, Facebook has registered growth of 4.67 per cent in Q3. Daily active users numbers are at 1.18 billion from 1.13 billion in last quarter.
“We had another good quarter,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Founder and CEO as the social media giant hit a new billion-user milestone with 1.0555 billion mobile-only users. “We’re making progress putting video first across our apps and executing our 10 year technology roadmap,” he added.
Maintaining the ad revenue registered in last quarter, Facebook posted 84 percent of ad revenue from mobile in Q3 too. This translates to USD 5.7 billion of its total USD 6.8 billion in ad revenue on mobile ads sales alone, including those on Instagram. Expenditures have slightly gone up to USD 1.1 billion.
According to eMarketer, Facebook is the largest ad publisher after Google. Despite the smashing performance, its share price sank about 7.6 percent due to the forecasts by Facebook CFO David Wehner, who said that Facebook is approaching maximum ad load. This means that the social network cannot increase the number of ads it shows any more. For six straight quarters, the number of increasing ads, along with user counts and engagement growth were crushing Wall Street forecasts and topping analyst expectations for earnings and revenue.
In video ads, Facebook directly competes with platforms such as Snapchat, Twitter and YouTube for whatever is spared in terms of budgets for social media platforms post investments in the television advertising industry. To its credit, Facebook has successfully run ads in its app in a rather user-friendly way and according to advertising experts is “benefiting from the efforts they have put in to show the effectiveness of its advertising”.
While Facebook is yet to release the numbers of its performance in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, its main focus since beginning of 2016 has been to make the region an integral part of the mobile-first world. More than 100 million people access Facebook on mobile phones across the MENA region and is one reason why Facebook is now creating content that is produced locally and is relevant to the people and the region. Services have been customized accordingly, Slideshow being an example of a tool it launched in the region to create videos for low bandwidth countries.
While 75 percent of video views around the world are on mobile, the MENA region is one of the biggest consumers of video worldwide. In the UAE alone, 50 percent of daily Facebook users watch at least one video a day, thereby contributing to making MENA one of the most important regions of revenue growth for Facebook.
