Facebook sees Q3 revenue growth amid concerns over maximum ad load

It was another good quarter for Facebook, seeing its revenue and its monthly active users increasing. Will the steady growth continue though?

Facebook seems to be unstoppable lately both, in growing its revenue, but also its users. Q3 2016 wasn’t different and it fact, it even surpassed the analysts’ projections with its actual stats.

Revenue

Facebook saw its revenue reaching $7.01B, with the analysts predicting $6.92B. In fact, Q3 sales grew 56% and they made the sixth quarterly revenue success for Facebook, which led to an increase of sales by more than 50%.

 

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Image: Techcrunch

Monthly active users keep increasing

It’s not just the revenue that increased in Q3 2016, but also the number of monthly active users (MAUs).

Facebook now counts 1.79B MAUs, despite the estimates for 1.76B. There was a growth of 4.7% from Q2 2016 and a 16% growth from Q3 2015, with the daily active users growing to 1.18B.

Mobile monthly active users are now 1.66B, seeing an increase of 20% since Q3 2015.

 

screen-shot-2016-11-02-at-1-23-48-pm

Image: Techcrunch

The power of mobile

There is an increasing number of mobile users, reaching now 1.055B. This means that a significant amount of Facebook’s user base is only accessing the social network through their smartphones.

Moreover, Facebook’s advertising revenue relies by 84% on mobile phones, which proves how a platform can take advantage of the rise of its mobile audience.

 

Putting video first

Except for the announcement of the stats for Q3 2016, Mark Zuckerberg also discussed the company’s further plans. We are not surprised to hear that going forward, they are determined to put video first. Video will be a significant part of all their apps and camera will be more important than ever, reminding us of Snapchat’s decision to place the camera as a home screen to its app.

Moreover, Zuckerberg also mentioned the rise of Facebook Live and the fact that its usage has grown 4x since May.

Why ad revenue growth cannot continue

Despite the consistent growth, Facebook’s share dropped by 7.6%, after a comment from CFO David Wehner, who believes that Facebook is approaching maximum ad load and its ad revenue growth cannot continue at this rate.

Thus, the increasing need for ads leads to lack of space, which shouldn’t be a surprise in the near future if it lead to a slower growth. His point seems to be sensible, as the rising interest from advertisers cannot be met at the same pace. After all, users, engagement and content cannot continue to increase every year at the rates that we’re currently measuring, unless Facebook has a secret plan we’re not aware of.

 

Since then, we’ll keep wondering if there’s any other social network to compete with Facebook’s impressive growth in the near future.

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