Mobile Drives 61 Per Cent Growth in Facebooks Q2 Revenues
- Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014
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Facebook has released its Q2 2014 results, with revenues hitting $2.9bn (£1.7bn), up 61 per cent on Q2 last year. Net profit, meanwhile, grew 138 per cent to $791m.
In the earnings call following the results, Facebook CFO David Ebersman pointed out that the quarter saw the strongest growth in advertising revenues since Q3 2011.
The majority of this growth was driven by mobile, with ad revenues growing 151 per cent to $1.6bn, accounting for 62 per cent of total ad revenue.
Facebooks earnings are increasingly dependent on advertising, it seems, with revenues from payments and other sources growing just nine per cent year-on-year to $234m.
Usage and engagement
That in turn reflects a swell in mobile users: of Facebooks 829m DAUs (Daily Active Users) during the period, 79 per cent were on mobile. And mobile MAUs (Monthly Active Users) hit 1.07bn, up 39 per cent year – making up 81 per cent of all MAUs, and growing over twice as fast.
After previous results raised a question mark over Facebooks popularity with teens, CEO Mark Zuckerberg specifically addressed the issue during the earnings call.
“There has been a lot of speculation reporting that fewer teens are using Facebook. But based on our data, that just isn’t true,” he said. “It’s difficult to measure this perfectly, since some young people lied on their age. But based on the best data we have, we believe that we’re close to fully penetrated in the US teen demographic for a while and the number of teens using Facebook on both a daily and monthly basis has been steady over the past year and half. Teens also remain really highly engaged using Facebook.
“Now, it’s also worth mentioning that these stats are for Facebook only. Instagram is growing quickly as well. If you combine the two services together, we believe our engagement and share of time spend are likely growing quickly throughout the world.”
The World Cup – and the rest of the world
Facebook also highlighted some campaigns during the period from its 1.5m active advertisers, including its first feature phone-only campaign in Asia with P&G’s Gillette brand.
With 80 per cent of Facebooks 100m users in India coming from mobile, and the majority of these on feature phones, agencies IBS and Mediacom worked with Facebook to launch the Vector 3 mens razor in the market. Facebook reports that the campaign reached 60 per cent of Gillette’s target audience and generated significant lift in both message and ad recall.
During the World Cup, meanwhile, Facebook saw 350m people discussing the tournament, generating 3bn interactions – 280m of which came from the Germany vs Argentina final alone, officially the single most talked-about sporting event in Facebook history.
Alongside the tournament, McDonalds worked with agencies OMD, Framestore and Arc, plus Facebook’s own Creative Shop, on the Fry Futbol campaign, consisting of videos that recreated memorable moments with French fries as players. Across 158 countries, this campaign reached 125m people – almost 100m of whom, Facebook has exclusively revealed to Mobile Marketing, were reached on mobile.