Facebook, Inc. surprised Wall Street and silenced its critics Wednesday, as its second quarter earnings report showed stronger than expected earnings, led by Facebook's mobile platform.
The social media giant's earnings for Q2 showed a sales increase of 53 percent to $1.81 billion over the last quarter, surpassing the expected figure of about $1.6 billion, and the company pulled in $1.18 billion in revenue, according to Time. It also earned $333 million in net income compared to a net loss of almost half as much in last year's second quarter.
There are several reasons behind Facebook's ad selling success, but the greatest of those is the mobile platform. Facebook's mobile ad revenue has increased by 76 percent compared to last year, and is now bringing in $656 million in revenue. The mobile platform provided 41 percent of its overall revenue, up 11 percent over last quarter and 23 percent over the quarter before that.
That's a huge leap and an impressive trend. At the beginning of last year, Facebook's mobile revenue compared to the company's total earnings was about... nothing. It was 0 percent.
Facebook has recently been making strides to transition its emphasis to mobile. For example, mobile app and photo-sharing network Instagram, purchased in early 2012 by Facebook, now has 130 million users. But, challenged by Twitter's Vine six-second video-sharing service, Facebook announced in late June that Instagram was getting an update with 15-second videos and other features. Five million videos were updated on the first day of the new Instagram's launch.
Before that, Facebook updated its app and introduced the Messaging app as a standalone. According to CNET, Facebook's mobile audience is now an average of 500 million people per day, and a total of 819 million, on average, visit the mobile site monthly. It's not clear if Facebook Home, an OS-like lockscreen for Android smartphones (pre-installed on the HTC "Facebook First") helped mobile earnings, but you can't blame them for trying.
Finally, as Latinos Post wrote Monday, one of the most popular Facebook apps isn't for smartphones, and though it doesn't get much attention, 100 million people have downloaded the "Facebook for Every Phone" app designed for plain-old feature phones.