If Facebook’s latest quarterly earnings report is any indication, the social network is growing at an exceptional pace.
During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call Wednesday, the social network revealed it now sees 1.59 billion monthly active users on the site – an increase of 46 million users since its last quarterly report.
For the first time, Facebook’s quarterly revenue surpassed $5 billion and the company more than doubled its net income to $1.56 billion in the last three months of 2015, putting it in position to challenge Google as the Internet’s most powerful company.
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But the company’s earnings results also showed that the average revenue per user (ARPU) is also on the rise. In other words, you are more valuable to Facebook than ever.
Just how valuable are you to Mark Zuckerberg and company you ask?
Well, according to the company’s numbers, average revenue per user increased to $3.73 last quarter. However, not all users are equal.
Canadian Facebook users earned the company $13.54 each last quarter.
European users garnered $4.50 each in revenue for the company and those in the Asia-Pacific region only generated $1.59 per user on average.
Facebook calculates this number based on its “estimation of the geographic location of our users when they perform a revenue-generating activity.” The reason the number varies so much is due to the amount of advertising revenue in each region.
Can Facebook overtake Google?
Google – now a part of the recently created parent company Alphabet Inc. – is thriving too, with more than 1 billion users on its search engine as well as its YouTube video site and its Android software for mobile devices. That makes it unlikely that Facebook will topple Google anytime soon.
Alphabet is expected to report fourth-quarter revenue of nearly $17 billion, after subtracting ad commissions, nearly triple what Facebook generated during the same three-month period.
But consider this: Facebook will be turning 12 next week and it just posted revenue of $5.8 billion in its latest quarter. At the same stage of its existence in September 2010, Google’s net revenue stood at $5.5 billion.
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Facebook’s revenue is also climbing faster than Google’s was at a comparable stage.
Facebook’s revenue in the past quarter represented a 52 per cent increase from the same time a year ago. When it turned 12, Google’s quarterly net revenue rose 25 per cent from the previous year.
In another sign of Facebook’s progress, its share of the digital advertising market rose from eight per cent in 2014 to 10 per cent worldwide last year, according to the research firm eMarketer Inc. Google’s share shrank from 32 per cent in 2014 to 30 per cent last year.
That’s still a lot of ground for Facebook to make up, but it’s not impossible.
— With files from The Associated Press
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