Mobile now responsible for over half of Facebook’s revenues

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 30 Jan 2014

Now that Facebook is a public company, they have to report their financial results every three months. Yesterday night, the company detailed their Q4 2013 numbers. I won’t get into all the details, but I do want to share two numbers. In Q4 2012, basically one year ago, mobile revenues made up 23% of Facebook’s advertising revenues. That number has now more than doubled to 53%. The company’s Chief Financial Officer, David Ebersman, says it best:

“I think it’s inarguable that Facebook is a mobile-first company”

Why do I bother bringing any of this up? Because Google had repeatedly admitted that social networking was the one internet trend that they completely missed. Google is trying hard, really hard, to catch up with Google+, but for now it seems to be a network only hardcore geeks and Google employees regularly use.

Now granted, today Google makes more money from ads than Facebook ever will, but there’s a serious potential of that changing over the coming years. Remember, Google didn’t invent AdSense and AdWords, they bought another company called Applied Semantics and bolted their technology onto their search engine. With all the recent acquisitions Google has made in the field of robotics, it’s clear, to me at least, that the company wants to diversify their revenue streams.

Has Facebook peaked? Some people are bored of the service and have left, but the numbers don’t lie, Facebook is growing, and fast.