Despite the WhatsApp acquisition, we may see more from Facebook’s pre-existing, in-house efforts, for example. “A large number of people access people from the mobile web so we are continuing to develop that but for the foreseeable future we will continue… to work on the native app experiences we have now.”Īnd the more established native app experiences are continuing to develop.
“There’s nothing wrong with HTML5… but both Apple and Google have made it easier to provide good experiences on their own platform,” Zuckerberg. One thing that stood out during the earnings call, in terms of Facebook’s mobile future, is that whatever those levers will be for growth, it sounds like they will continue to remain native experiences. “We want to grow it slowly and deliberately.” An app-tastic future “We don’t see the need or urge to ramp this,” she said in reference to adds. But that’s not at the expense of continuing to scale up the user base. We have seen some great results,” Sandberg noted during the call, using a campaign from Levi’s with pictures of denim in outdoor space, as a sign of things to come. “Instagram is a great advertising product because there are tons of demand and pictures are visually appealing. Interestingly, it sounds like whatever future plans Facebook has for driving more mobile ads, it will not necessarily factor Instagram into the equation in a massive way, at least for now. (Note: it’s not the first time we’ve heard that one but apparently this may really, really be coming out now.) Facebook is expected to be announcing a mobile ad network at its F8 developer conference at the end of this month, and in the earnings call today COO Sheryl Sandberg confirmed “early testing” of such a network. A year ago they made up 30% of all ad revenues. They are now at 59% of all ad sales, equivalent to $1.4 billion. Mobile ads continue to be a powerhouse for the company. While we have yet to see how Facebook eventually decides to monetise its WhatsApp userbase, one area where it is already reaping some big rewards is in advertising on its existing products, specifically its Facebook itself. Facebook is, in some regards, betting the house on mobile. On the other hand, hitting 1 billion is a vindication of sorts: Facebook in the last quarter announced that it would fork out $19 billion on mobile messaging service WhatsApp to help it push deeper into connecting with and growing its mobile user base, and specifically into the kinds of markets where WhatsApp does well, emerging and fast-growing economies. The news that Facebook has passed 1 billion users, rising 34% in a year, is on one hand a mark of a relentless trend for the company - more and more people are accessing the social network on phones and tablets than on desktop computers, a trend that is only growing as Facebook pushes into more developing markets where handsets are often a user’s primary link to the Internet. “We’ve grown fastest in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia, and our users are also sharing more than 700 million photos and 100 million videos every single day,” WhatsApp noted in the blog post announcing the news. Were Facebook to consolidate WhatsApp usage, and that of Instagram, with its wider mobile numbers, that figure would presumably shoot up to over 800 million, with WhatsApp making a timely announcement, just a day before its new owner’s quarterly earnings, that it has reached a milestone of 500,000 “regular, active users of WhatsApp.” Interestingly, mobile-only users nearly doubled over a year ago and now stand at 341 million.
(And a MAU is defined as “a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, used our Messenger app, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website or application that is integrated with Facebook, in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.” Hence the higher number as the metric catches more people.) Facebook defines a DAU as “a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, used our Messenger app, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website or application that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day.” Facebook’s daily active users on mobile are at 609 million for the quarter.