With strong quarter growth, Facebook hits 1.71 bn monthly users

New York: Showing strong revenue and profit growth, social networking giant Facebook has added 60 million monthly users in the second quarter of 2016 to reach 1.71 billion users while scoring $6.44 billion in revenue -- blowing the earlier estimates of $6.02 billion.

Its social network operation raked in $2.05 billion in profit compared to $719 million a year ago.

Wall Street on Thursday reacted to the positive earnings with a 7.5 percent surge in Facebook's shares ($132 per share) in after-hours trading.

While daily active users (DAUs) were 1.13 billion on average for June - an increase of 17 percent year-over-year, mobile DAUs were 1.03 billion on average for the same month - an increase of 22 percent year-over-year.

Monthly active users were 1.71 billion - an increase of 15 percent year-over-year and mobile MAUs were 1.57 billion - an increase of 20 percent year-over-year.

This is Facebook’s 16th beat out of 17 quarters since it went public at $38 per share, Tech Crunch reported.

"Our community and business had another good quarter. We're particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services," Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, said in a statement.

Facebook now sees two billion searches per day, up from 1.5 billion a year ago.

According to Zuckerberg, people searching for what others are saying about certain topics is driving that growth, which highlights Facebook’s on-going quest to win public chatter as space Twitter has long ruled. However, Facebook doesn’t plan to rush to monetize search.

Advertising on mobile devices accounted for 84 per cent of Facebook’s $6.2 billion in advertising sales, Wall Street Journal reported.

“Revenue generated from mobile ads jumped 80 per cent in the second quarter, faster than Facebook’s overall 59 per cent advertising growth rate," it added.

The average revenue per user is now $3.82, up 15 per cent from last quarter.

One billion people are now using Facebook Messenger every month. Messenger is now the second-most popular iOS app of all time, behind Facebook.

Facebook-owned Instagram has now reached 500 million users.

Earlier, although it added three million users -- one million more that what analysts had expected -- the not-so-promising second quarter earnings results led to the shares of micro-blogging website Twitter tumbling this week which wiped out nearly 10 per cent from its share price in after-market trading.

The company posted quarterly revenue of $602 million, up 20 per cent year-over-year and reported $107 million GAAP net loss ($0.15 per share) with quarterly non-GAAP net income of $93 million ($0.13 per share).

A year ago, the year-over-year growth was 61 per cent and two years back, it was a whooping 124 per cent.