Facebook Reveals Progress In Q3 Earnings Report

Between all of the commotion of Apple announcing the iPad mini and Zynga laying off over 100 people today, Facebook was making a seemingly small splash by releasing their third quarter earnings report. That’s right, Facebook, the company that everyone thought was a really exciting stock until it wasn’t; we’re still talking about them. Well good news (kind of)! The numbers that Facebook released today were better than many Wall Street analysts predicted, but they still weren’t great.

The company’s earnings report today revealed that in Q3 Facebook had a revenue of $1.26 billion, which is roughly seven percent higher than what it reported in the previous quarter. Possibly even more exciting news was that the company’s net income based on non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) was $372 million, roughly a twenty-six percent increase from the second quarter. But if you look at the GAAP numbers, which account for such things as income and payroll taxes, Facebook actually suffered a $59 million loss. That’s far from impressive.

 But Facebook is moving in the right direction. And in addition to the earnings report, Facebook revealed a little bit about its strategy moving forward: they’re stressing mobile. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement:

“As proud as I am that a billion people use Facebook each month, I’m also really happy that over 600 million people now share and connect on Facebook every month using mobile devices. People who use our mobile products are more engaged, and we believe we can increase engagement even further as we continue to introduce new products and improve our platform. At the same time, we are deeply integrating monetization into our product teams in order to build a stronger, more valuable company.”

And it was revealed that around fourteen percent of the company’s revenue has come from mobile advertising. That’s pretty impressive, considering the company has often been criticized for lagging on the mobile front. We also learned that Facebook sees more daily returning users via mobile apps and mobile browsers than through the native website.

So what does Facebook need to do to continue in the right direction? Keep pushing mobile. They need to not be afraid to try new things, but they also need to be able to identify when efforts aren’t working. Their stats are not outliers. People are moving, in waves, towards mobile. Facebook needs to try to stay ahead of the curve if they’re ever going to meet the expectations people had back in May. Break things and move quickly.