Facebook smiling as revenue cracks $4bn mark

31 July 2015 - 02:37 By Andrew Trotman, ©The Daily Telegraph

Facebook now chews up one out of every five minutes people spend on cellphones in the US, the social network revealed as it unveiled its second-quarter results. Users spend an average of 46 minutes a day on Facebook's apps, excluding the massively popular messaging service WhatsApp, with people making 1.5billion searches a day on the site. It has also indexed more than 2trillion posts.The figures announced by Facebook, led by founder Mark Zuckerberg, show its growth in popularity, with 1.49billion monthly active users as of June 30, up 13% from a year earlier. Of these, 1.31billion accessed the service through a mobile device, a rise of 23%."Mobile is the engine of our revenue growth," said chief financial officer David Wehner.Revenue jumped to $4.04-billion in the three months ended June 30, from $2.91-billion in the same period last year.However, net income attributable to stockholders fell to $715-million from $788-million as total costs and expenses jumped 82% to $2.77-billion. Most of this rise was due to stock-based compensation following the $19-billion purchase of WhatsApp last year.Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said the huge increase in expenses would generate the "growth we need now and in the future"."We are investing in the next set of services. such as Messenger, WhatsApp and Oculus."About 700million people now use Messenger. The app has been downloaded more than 1billion times.Macquarie Research analyst Ben Schachter said the costs and spending met expectations."We think Facebook has a lot of opportunities so we want to see them vesting quite heavily in those investments," he said.On Oculus, Facebook's virtual reality business, Zuckerberg said that "immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing" after video.Facebook's good results came just a day after rival Twitter's shares slumped following disappointing second-quarter figures. ..

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