Facebook continued its winning streak as other tech companies floundered, reaching 1.65 billion monthly users and surpassing estimates in its Q1 2016 earnings report with $5.38 billion in revenue and $0.77 earnings per share. Facebook’s share price climbed more than 8 percent in the moments after earnings were announced, reaching more than $117 in after-hours trading.
Revenue was up 52 percent year over year, and Facebook is still operating with strong efficiency, coining $1.5 billion in profit in Q1, up 195 percent year over year. Average revenue per user was up 32 percent YoY.
User growth accelerates
Facebook grew 3.77 percent, from 1.59 billion monthly users last quarter, and did well coming off the Q4 holiday period’s $5.841 billion in revenue. That’s a huge improvement from Q4’s 2.58 percent quarter over quarter user growth, and almost as high as Q3’s extremely strong 4.02 percent growth.
For reference, Twitter was only able to add 5 million users this quarter. Facebook added 12X as many users as Twitter, despite only being 5X its size
Analysts expected $5.25 billion in revenue and $0.62 EPS, which Facebook handily exceeded. Facebook is also adding a new class of stock to let the public buy in without getting voting rights that could disrupt Mark Zuckerberg’s iron grip on the company’s direction, including long-term bets on artificial intelligence, virtual reality and Internet connectivity.
While many focus on monthly users, Facebook’s daily user count more accurately reflects its health. It reached 1.09 billion daily active users in Q1, compared to 1.04 billion in Q4 2015, up 4.8 percent — even faster growth than its monthly user count. Facebook’s stickiness, its DAU to MAU ratio, grew to 66 percent from 65 percent last quarter, meaning even more of its monthly users access it every day than before.
Overall, Facebook’s family of apps strategy is working. Facebook is now at 1.65 billion users, Messenger has 900 million and Instagram has 400 million. Users of these apps now spend anaverage of 50 minutes per day on these three.
Sign up here with your email
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon