It’s official: Facebook now makes more than half its ad money from mobile

Wondering how much cash Zuck and company are raking in from those little ads they keep sticking into the Newsfeed of your Facebook app? A lot. The social network with a much-debated mobile problem is now generating more than half its total ad income from phones and tablets.

That’s according to the company’s latest financial results, which state that 53% of the US$2.34-billion Facebook brought in in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2013 came from its mobile products. Yes, all those sponsored posts, recommended pages and suggestions of apps you should install are working. Which is good news for a company that makes 90% of its money from ads.

Overall, it’s been a good year for Facebook: it more than doubled its revenue from 2012 to 2013, bringing in US$7.87-billion by the end of December, while net income reached US$1.50-billion. And the social network’s user base is still growing — last month, it averaged 757-million daily active users. Yes, more than three quarters of a billion people log into Facebook every day. Of those, 556-million (73%) are mobile users.

When it comes to monthly active users, Facebook is still in the billions — it saw 1.23-billion users in December, 945-million (78%) of whom were using mobile devices — an increase of 39% from the same time last year. In the next few months, Facebook will be working on keeping that huge percentage of mobile users interested with the upcoming release of much-rumoured newsreader app Paper, as well as a reported suite of standalone mobile apps.