China, India and Facebook. If you go by the numbers, Facebook (again) has enough users to be the world's third largest country.
In reporting its Q3 2013 financials, the company boasted its monthly active users hit 1.19 billion as of September 30. That's an 18% increase year-on-year. Last quarter, Facebook notched up 1.15 billion monthlies.
So yeah, the social network has been populous for awhile now.
More importantly for the "mobile first" company, Facebook registered staggering mobile numbers. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the company's earnings call, 48% of people who use Facebook on a daily access it entirely on mobile. In fact, web usage numbers declined for the first time last quarter, albeit only slightly.
Mobile, baby
Mobile monthly active users number 874 million strong, a huge leap of 45% from the same time last year. On average there were 507 million mobile daily active users scrolling through News Feeds and posting statuses during the quarter.
And if you don't think ads are here to stay or that they won't grow more pervasive on mobile, get your head out of the sand. Zuckerberg said 49% of its $2.02 billion (about £1.2b, AU$2.12b) revenue came from the platform. This was the company's first two billion dollar quarter, by the way.
Zuck wouldn't bite on answering when we'd see video ads in our feeds, but said the presence of video on Instagram has "been very positive so far." Facebook is taking its time rolling out auto-play ads he said, as the company wants it to be "a positive thing" for users.
Quick Insta-caveat - the photo-centric site has 150 million monthly active users, its parent company reported.
One negative for Facebook was that, as far as it can tell, teen users have taken a dive. It's hard to be totally accurate, CFO David Ebersman said, as people self-report and therefore can lie about their age, but the company's own metrics have found younger daily active users dropping off.
Facebook is doing fine, but it may need to re-think its cool factor for the under-18 set.
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