Facebook shows no sign of stopping, now has 1.86 billion users
The company continues to make a lot of money.
Facebook is under quite a bit of pressure of late. It's trying to fix the rise of fake news and clickbait on its News Feed and, more recently, it's had to deal with the Zenimax lawsuit against Oculus. But all of that hasn't eaten into Facebook's bottom line. As its Q4 2016 earnings report shows, the company once again raked in cash hand over fist, with $8.8 billion in revenue and $3.56 billion in profit. Its user growth also continues to climb, with 1.86 billion monthly users and 1.74 billion logging in on mobile. Mobile advertising made up 84 percent of its revenue last quarter.
Those numbers are pretty good when you look at daily users too. The company reports that 1.23 billion people use Facebook everyday, with 1.15 billion doing so from mobile devices. Still, the growth is only up 3.91 percent from last quarter, which is slightly slower than the 4.67 percent reported a few months ago. Also, while $8.8 billion is certainly a hefty amount, it'll lose around $500 million due to the Zenimax lawsuit payout announced earlier today.
For the whole of 2016, Facebook made close to $27 billion, which is an increase of 57 percent from the previous year. Much of the growth can be attributed to expansions of Facebook properties like Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the earnings call that he continues to see video as a "mega trend" going forward. Facebook will continue to prioritize video, introducing new ways to capture and upload clips, and making it easier to search for them too. It will also look to improve Facebook Live as people continue to use it. It's experimenting with Live 360 video, face filters and more.
Zuckerberg also touched on the rise of Instagram and messaging over the past year. Instagram recently hit over 600 million users, which could be attributed to the growth of Stories. Indeed, he said that Stories has nearly 150 million daily active users just five months after its launch. As for Messenger, Zuckerberg said that 400 million people use Facebook Messenger's audio and video calling every month, while WhatsApp has over 1.2 billion users a month sending around 50 billion messages every day.
As for VR, Zuckerberg didn't say much about the Zenimax lawsuit, but he did touch a little bit about how the Oculus business is doing. He said that the fact Samsung sold about 5 million Gear VR units is obviously a good thing, but was a little disappointed by the delay of the Rift and the Touch. He added that he thought the company was a little behind than where he'd like them to be in regards to VR and AR.
