Each Day 2.1 Billion People Use Facebook’s Family of Apps
In Q2 Facebook reported revenue of $16.886 billion, which is up 28% comparing to the second quarter of last year. Nearly all of the Facebook’s revenue came from advertising.
Facebook said that over 2.1 billion people now use its family of applications—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger—on a daily basis, and more than 2.7 billion do so on a monthly basis.
Facebook shows 1.59 billion daily active users in Q2, which is up 8% from the same period last year. DAUs and Monthly Active Users show continuous grow since 2017.
Source: Facebook
Mobile advertising revenue accounted for 94% of total advertising revenue for the quarter, up from 91% last year.
Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said during her opening remarks, “Consumers often adopt new technologies first, and our competitive advantage is helping advertisers reach people where they are. We helped businesses make the shift to mobile, and now we are helping them shift to Stories, video and eventually messaging. We know that it’s not enough to make these new formats available. We also need to make it easy for advertisers to create effective ads. We do this by launching new ad products and by improving our existing ones to deliver more value for people and advertisers.”
She did not discount News Feed ads, saying, “We’re constantly making incremental improvements to Facebook feed ads. This quarter, we improved how quickly we refresh the ads people see. In the past, these ads were pre-selected at the beginning of a feed session. Now, the ads are refreshed while people are scrolling through their feed. This means people get more relevant ads, which improves engagement and delivers a better return on investment for advertisers.”
She expanded on Stories ads during the question-and-answer portion of the call, saying, “One of the most important things we learned as we were doing this transition to mobile is that if we made it easier for our advertisers to place the ad, to make sure they understood the measurement they were having, and also to make sure the ads format worked, businesses would move more quickly. Usually, people move before businesses, so people moved to mobile before businesses, and we certainly saw the same with Stories. But I think one of the successes you’re seeing that we’re having right now is that we are helping people move to Stories more quickly because of the lessons we learned.”
Sandberg continued, “So, for example, automatic placements: What automatic placements is they convert feed ads into a Stories format and deliver the ads wherever they get their best results. And I think product innovations like that have gotten us to 3 million advertisers across the three properties we have available—Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Rather than going to every advertiser, both through our sales force and our online tools where we sell, and saying, ‘We have a new format, you need to create the new format, you need to figure out the placement,’ being able to just take what they are already doing, like feed ads, convert it into Stories and place it anywhere helped us to move people into these formats.”
She concluded, “It’s also the case that we have a lot of inventory on this. There’s a real benefit right now for early adopters: Pricing is very attractive. So, we think the mix to Stories is a big opportunity for us and advertisers over time. I’ll say one more thing, which is that Stories don’t monetize right now at the same rate as News Feed. We are optimistic about the growth over the long run, but we are, as always, very prudent and careful on the consumer experience.”
