Facebook Q3 2013 results:

• Earnings per share: 25 cents - that's a beat.
• Revenues: $2.02 billion - that's a beat.
• Monthly active users: 1.19 billion (1.155 billion Q2).
• Daily active users:  728m  (699m in Q2).
• Mobile daily active users: 507 million (469 m in Q2).
• Mobile monthly active users: 874 million (819m in Q2)
• Mobile only monthly active users: 254 million (219m in Q2)
• Mobile advertising was 49% of revenue.
• Net income: $425 million.

The full results are here.

48% of Facebook users on a given day are only accessing it from mobile. (source)

Sandberg noted that Facebook accounts for more mobile minutes in the U.S. than “YouTube, Pandora, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, AOL, Snapchat and LinkedIN — combined.” (It seems that this stat was taken from comScore research, which actually combined Instagram and Facebook together.)

Mobile-only users on a monthly basis now stand at 254 million. With 1.19 billion MAUs overall, it means that 21.3% of MAUs are now mobile-only. While that is less than half the DAU percentage, it is still a growing number, up 2.3 percentage points from 19% in Q2.

The same may not be said for desktop. CFO David Ebersman noted that daily actives on web “declined modestly,” in contrast to what is happening on mobile. Facebook’s daily active users on mobile worldwide now stand at 507 million, up by 38 million over Q2; while monthly active users are up to 874 million, up 55 million from Q2.

Mother of God.

Sorry, I need to repeat Sheryl Sandberg's point.

Facebook accounts for more mobile minutes in the U.S. than “YouTube, Pandora, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, AOL, Snapchat and LinkedIN — combined.”

Madre de Dios.

Teens may be less engaged on Facebook but everyone else is still engaged.

Unbelievable! and people questioned its profitability?

http://investorplace.com/2012/01/is-facebook-profitable/

 I wonder is such rapid revenue growth unique? Incredible.

Such rapid revenue growth is unique. It shows how big Facebook is on mobile devices.

Half of Facebook's ad revenue is now on mobile:

As part of its third quarter financial performance, Facebook today reported that 49 percent of its advertising revenue in the period came from mobile usage. That figure is up 8 percent from the second quarter, in which Facebook reported 41 percent of its advertising revenue came from mobile usage.

Facebook had third quarter advertising revenue of $1.8 billion. Forty-nine percent of that tally is $882 million, implying that Facebook’s desktop advertising revenue for the quarter totaled $918 million.

In the second quarter, Facebook had advertising revenue of $1.6 billion, of which 41 percent was mobile-sourced, or $656 million. That implied that Facebook had desktop-sourced ad revenue of $944 million in the second quarter.

Thus, Facebook’s desktop advertising revenue fell $26 million from the second to third quarter. Facebook’s first quarter desktop ad revenue (calculated in the same way) totaled $875 million. Therefore, for now, Facebook’s desktop ad revenue peaked in 2013 in the second quarter.

Net-net? Pretty soon Facebook won't need ads on desktop at all because mobile ads are so lucrative.

Instagram now has 150 MAU's. (That number hasn't changed in while, FYI.)

Some analysts have price targets of $65 for Facebook because of Instagram.

What seems to have changed is that Wall Street is waking up to the fact that Facebook is about to introduce advertising into Instagram, the wildly popular photo-sharing app it owns. Analysts at Evercore believe Instagram could throw off $340 million in revenue in 2014.

Sena and McNellis believe analysts have not fully factored in Facebook's relationships with Datalogix and Acxiom, two companies that help advertisers take their offline data — lists of phone numbers, for instance — and use that as a targeting mechanism on Facebook.

Here's their chart on Facebook's revenue per user versus Google's. Lots of growth left, they believe:

Across iOS and Android, Instagram is the third most downloaded mobile app of all-time according to Priori at 220 million installs as of March. This compares to Facebook’s 604 million in the first spot and Google Search’s 404 million in number 2. However, we note that Instagram also shows signs of faster growth, with 7% of the apps installs coming in March, compared to only 4% for Facebook. Moreover, FB Messenger ranked fifth globally and also showed to be increasing faster than Twitter. 

Source is figure 18:

http://prioridata.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Evercore-Partners_Priori-Data-FB-Report.pdf

http://prioridata.com/evercore-partners/

I'm still looking for Instagram engagement numbers.

BEFORE FACEBOOK DEAL, INSTAGRAM TALKED WITH TWITTER:

Facebook’s deal to buy Instagram for $1 billion stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley when it was announced in April. But executives at Twitter had an additional reason to be surprised. Instagram’s founders “held several meetings as late as March with top Twitter executives,” The New York Times’s Nick Bilton reports. “The sides had verbally agreed weeks earlier on a price for Instagram of $525 million in cash and Twitter shares,” Mr. Bilton reports, citing people on both sides of the talks, who requested anonymity because the talks were private and because they were concerned about legal repercussions.

That would appear to contradict statements that Instagram’s chief executive, Kevin Systrom, made under oath, according to Mr. Bilton. Mr. Systrom testified in August at a hearing of the California Corporations Department that his company “never received any offers” at the time of the negotiations with Facebook. Instagram, he said, “talked to other parties, but never received any formal offers from anybody else.”

But when the deal was announced, Twitter executives were “shocked that they had not been given an opportunity to present a counteroffer,” Mr. Bilton reports. The people familiar with the negotiations “said Twitter was prepared to make higher offers.” The Facebook deal closed at $735 million in early September, after Facebook’s stock tumbled. Mr. Bilton writes: “It is possible investors would have been better off selling in an open auction, to Twitter or even to Google or Microsoft.”

Kara Swisher's telling of the story also wonders how Instagram could sell to Facebook:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/06/kara-swisher-instagram

Instagram has more daily users than Twitter:

http://pandawhale.com/post/9181/instagram-now-has-more-daily-active-users-than-twitter

Does that mean Instagram could have more revenue than Twitter?

We'll see.

Facebook does not break out Instagram user engagement numbers so we're speculating.

One of Facebook's "Big Data" marketing partners, Acxiom, has figured out how to know whether a person who has used several different names is the same person or not.

It's rolling out a new product for marketers, called "Audience Operating System," that allows advertisers to tie together your "digital persona" even if you've changed your name due to marriage, the use of a nickname, or because you sometimes use a middle name. It also figures out whether someone who has moved addresses or changed phone numbers is the same person or not.

AOS solves a longstanding problem for the kind of big, packaged goods marketers that Facebook wants as advertising clients: Pulling together the information in different databases, online and off, that companies may have collected on individuals on separate occasions.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-and-acxioms-big-data-partnership-2013-9#ixzz2jHE5LoMT