Defying the massive fake news scandal that hit the social networking giant during the US presidential election as well as analysts, Facebook has registered strong growth in its mobile advertising business, with total revenue reaching $8.8 billion from $5.84 billion last year.
It means $1.41 profit per share instead of the $1.31 that Wall Street was expecting. The quarterly profit was $3.57 billion -- more than double ($1.56 billion) the company reported last year, Fortune reported on Thursday.
For the full year, Facebook's revenue climbed by $10 billion or 54 per cent to just over $27.5 billion compared with $17.9 billion in 2015 and the company's net income for the year more than doubled to $10 billion.
Mired in controversies like "fake news" and inaccurate advertising, Facebook itself expected a slowdown in the growth rate of its advertising revenue.
The one way by which the Menlo Park, California-based company registered the growth was by adding more than 265 million new monthly active users in 2016 -- almost as many users as the micro-blogging website Twitter has in total.
Facebook now has more than 1.8 billion users who log on every month and more than 1.2 billion users who do so every day.
Daily active users hit 1.23 billion, up from 1.18 billion last quarter and up 18 percent (Year-on-Year), compared to 17 percent last quarter.
Another major growth engine for the social media giant was mobile.
Over 1 billion of Facebook's daily users access the site primarily on their phones or tablets and that number grew by 23 per cent in the latest quarter. Mobile ad revenue made up about 84 per cent of the company's total ad revenue.
Facebook also said it earned $12.4 billion in income from operations last year, nearly double the total from 2015 ($6.2 billion).
Mobile now makes up 84 percent of its ad revenue -- the same as last quarter -- signalling that Facebook has successfully shifted to mobile.
"During the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was repeatedly asked about Facebook's video content strategy. He explained that "we're focusing on shorter form content to start", and that the company needs to build a sustainable ad revenue sharing business model to pay professional creators to bring that content to Facebook, Tech Crunch reported.
--IANS
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