Facebook’s aggressive ad sales strategy appears to be paying off, as the social networking firm posted profits of $523m (£316m) marking a 63% increase in revenue for the fourth quarter, beating market expectations in the process.
The rise in revenue was largely due to stronger mobile advertising sales, a priority of boss Mark Zuckerberg who famously implemented a ‘mobile first’ strategy last year.
Advertising revenue increased 76% from the same period last year, with more than half of that coming from mobile.
Overall, Facebook said it had 757 million daily global users as of December 2013.
For the full year for 2013, Facebook reported profits of $1.5bn and said its daily active users grew by 22%.
“It was a great end to the year for Facebook,” said Zuckerberg in a statement.”We’re looking forward to our next decade and to helping connect the rest of the world.”
Facebook shares soared more than 10% in after-hours trading on the news.
By comparison, Google is still leads the global ad sales market, with a 32.4% share of the $117.6bn spent on digital advertising in 2013.
Facebook is now second in terms of ad sales, getting a 16% of the global ad sales market at $523m, surpassing Yahoo as the number two digital advertising seller in the US last year.
Rise of Instagram and Facebook Messenger
On the call to discuss earnings, Facebook executives also highlighted two big Facebook apps: Messenger and Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1bn.
Chief financial officer David Ebersman said Instagram doubled its user base, but did not name specific figures.
Ebersman declined to discuss the advertising load on Instagram, saying: “We’re just really early with Instagram… We’re going to move slowly because we think that’s the right thing to do.”
Zuckerberg also highlighted the growth of Facebook’s Messenger, saying the number of users was up 70%. He did not break down usage by region.
Read the official announcement here