Mobile now gives Facebook 73% of its ad revenue

Almost three quarters of Facebook's advertising revenue now comes from mobile, its latest quarter reveals, with total earnings growing 42 per cent year-on-year to 2.35 billion.

The number of daily active users rose 17 per cent to 936 million, compared to the same period in 2014, the social network disclosed yesterday, while the total userbase grew 13 per cent to 1.44 billion.

Mobile daily active users, meanwhile, hit 798 million on average in March 2015, an even higher increase of 31 per cent year-on-year.

Those users provided Facebook with 73 per cent of its advertising revenue, up from 59 per cent in 2014.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: "This was a strong start to the year. We continue to focus on serving our community and connecting the world."

However, profits fell 20 per cent to 342 million, with costs growing 83 per cent.

TechMarketView analyst Richard Holway said: "Although we applaud Facebook's efforts to build a Facebook Family' including WhatsApp, Instagram and the VR app Oculus Rift, these are still to make a financial impact.

"These new family members are vital. Facebook's growth in users is slowing. It's the oldies that are now embracing Facebook, much to the chagrin of the young."

The company recently came under fire after it was discovered to be tracking people's online habits across over 13 million sites, even when users weren't using the social network, but the firm attributed the problem to a bug.

Despite the growth in mobile marketing, Facebook's earnings and revenue performance fell below analyst expectations.

"Against the backdrop of Facebook's fairly unremarkable first quarter earnings and revenue performance, the mobile-only metric is what Facebook must get the market to focus on more intently," Ken Odeluga, analyst at City Index, told The Independent.

"Facebook wants to hold out the promise that this spending will be monetised intensely and that this will eventually push it past Google to the top spot in digital advertising market share."

Caroline Preece

Caroline has been writing about technology for more than a decade, switching between consumer smart home news and reviews and in-depth B2B industry coverage. In addition to her work for IT Pro and Cloud Pro, she has contributed to a number of titles including Expert Reviews, TechRadar, The Week and many more. She is currently the smart home editor across Future Publishing's homes titles.

You can get in touch with Caroline via email at caroline.preece@futurenet.com.