Facebook Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results

http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=861599

by antr • 12 years ago

78 54 12 years ago

investor.fb.com

    Mobile MAUs were 1.07 billion as of June 30, 2014,
    an increase of 31% year-over-year.

That's crazy. 1/7th of the world's population logs in to Facebook from a mobile device at least once a month.

msoad• 12 years ago

Wait for Google with their subsidized Android One phones in India and China to see more than 1/7th...

julianpye• 12 years ago

No Facebook in China. Facebook mostly faces political growth limits right now...

b0ard• 12 years ago

That's probably the wrong way to interpret that number.

Many people have multiple devices (phones/tablets) and people have multiple accounts as well.

Still an impressive number nonetheless, even if it was 1/10th of the world's population...

chmullig• 12 years ago

No, the original was correct. That's 1.07B distinct people.

Crazier, IMO, is the DAU. 829 million log in EVERY DAY.

rsivapr• 12 years ago

I would think it's fair assumption that a significant percentage of those users are being counted multiple times if they have duplicate accounts.

EDIT: I don't see how the above statement beckons downvotes. Yes. It was an assumption, but not absurd one at that. Here's one such article that talks about fake accounts -- http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-media/facebook-fak...

EDIT2: Last year Facebook said 4.8% of their MAU was duplicate, misclassified, or spam accounts. That's 51+ million today assuming the percentage has remained constant.

ihsw• 12 years ago

Who has duplicate accounts on Facebook?

rahimnathwani2• 12 years ago

Fake accounts != Duplicate accounts

pbreit• 12 years ago

It's not a fair assumption. It's a cynical assumption. And an incorrect assumption. Why don't you be a little more careful?

WhitneyLand• 12 years ago

And yet increasing their revenue 7x still wouldn't let them match Google financially.

What they've achieved is no doubt impressive but there is still a lot to figure out in the model to extract as much as possible from all those users.

adventured2• 12 years ago

Close.

GOOG sales: $16b for the latest quarter; FB sales: $2.9b; 5.5 fold difference

GOOG net income: $3.39b; FB net income: $791m; 3.84 fold difference

TrainedMonkey• 12 years ago

Are they including Whats App users in that number? Because that would help explain it.

charlesma• 12 years ago

The whatsapp deal hasn't closed, so no.

I don't think the numbers include instagram either, it hasn't been monetized and therefore irrelevant to financials.

Edit: Confirmed, doesn't include instagram users. In the earnings slides http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/3349527922...

The number of DAUs, mobile DAUs, MAUs, and mobile MAUs do not include Instagram users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users, respectively, based on their other activities on Facebook.

rahimnathwani2• 12 years ago

It doesn't necessarily mean that. 2/7ths of the world's population logging in to FB once every two months would result in the same MAU number, even with zero people logging on _every_ month.

Moreover, these MAU numbers probably include people like me, who receive a push notification of a message sent to a group, click it once to view the message, and quit the app after 2 seconds.

It's still a large number, though!

wozniacki• 12 years ago

Is there a universally agreed metric of what a mobile MAU constitutes?

Is there a generally agreed unit of time spent per instance of log in activity, to qualify as a MAU?

Or just the very act of stumbling into the FB app (somehow), through the myriad ways possible out there, still constitute a MAU?

I understand that this does not count (?) API calls (justifiably).

All these years in, I just want to assure myself that we are still not in the era of sketchy metrics and non-standard parameters.

For example this Nielsen graphic is from 2012 and shows time spent, on social networking broadly, in HH:MM

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/12/nielsen-...

Note: Asked in the other duplicate post, as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077054

Aqueous2• 12 years ago

Wow. They really knocked it out of the park.

829 million DAU - I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account.

carb• 12 years ago

why was this downvoted?

bertil• 12 years ago

The part "I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account." probably came off as irrelevant and poorly worded to some users. I'm actually not sure how to connect personal emotion and not being part of a popular option.

Igglyboo3• 12 years ago

These numbers are seriously mind boggling a DAU count of 829 million is close to 1/8th of the worlds population. Even more impressive when you consider the fact that only about 3 billion even have internet access.

~1/3 of the people on the planet with internet access are logging into Facebook every. single. day.

ozgune• 12 years ago

Do these DAU/MAU numbers include WhatsApp users?

lolwhatisthis• 12 years ago

They said the WhatsApp deal would close later this year, implying it hasn't yet finalized, so I would imagine this does not include those numbers.

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

Even more impressive when you consider that the world's largest country of internet users doesn't even have access to Facebook.

cliveowen2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure they count every single minor interaction as a log-in. You receive a notification on your phone and then swipe it away? That's an interaction.

Igglyboo3• 12 years ago

829 million DAU translates to roughly 10k users logging in a second, I can't even imagine how many requests that translates to. Can someone explain how their infrastructure works so they can manage this? I literally cannot fathom a system to handle this that isn't multiple millions of servers.

nbm3• 12 years ago

It's hard to answer this easily in a holistic fashion without getting really abstract. Is there a particular part you're wondering about?

tristanz• 12 years ago

What's the trend around external vs. eventual consistency at Facebook? I ask this comparing eventual consistency in TOA and Google's shift towards external consistency in Spanner.

Igglyboo3• 12 years ago

Just like a high level overview of there setup, I'd assume they would do more sophisticated things than just throwing more hardware at the problem(millions of servers vs thousands).

melvinmt• 12 years ago

Start here: http://highscalability.com/blog/category/facebook

threeseed• 12 years ago

As of June last year they had hundreds of thousands of machines. As for the architecture it is basically a PHP app in front of a massive fleet of Memcached instances and a few databases here and there specifically for different apps e.g. photos, messages etc.

nbm3• 12 years ago

That is a bit simplistic and is missing a bunch of things.

First the numerous C++ and Java backend services that do most of the heavy lifting like producing the feed, doing searches (of various types, both from what people type in, and internal ones), sending and receiving messages, spam and fake account detection, &c. The PHP portion acts as a front-end to these services.

TAO is the graph caching system that has largely replaced memcache at Facebook.

Just on the traffic side, there is the global traffic management system (for dynamic and for static content), different types of load balancers, CDN-specific caching software, image and video transcoding/encoding, &c.

And that's just the stuff involved in the production path - there are all sorts of behind-the-scenes things that do async work of various types - either as soon as possible (video encoding, updating) or on a daily or whatever cadence to update infrequently-changing things.

jamesgpearce• 12 years ago

Our engineers talk about lots of things (including how the architecture scales) on https://code.facebook.com/posts/

yid• 12 years ago

Perhaps someone could explain to me in simple terms why FB's stock has been surging for the past week (and is currently $75 in after-hours). Did people have an "inkling" about the financials?

jliptzin• 12 years ago

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-fin...

iblaine• 12 years ago

The sarcastic side of me would like to say that facebooks success is due to the recent increase in embedded video links in the news feeds. The videos are annoying. But FBs reach is increasingly impressive. Surely that's the driver.

andys627• 12 years ago

Do they measure how many people load a like button on a 3rd party site?

kenjackson• 12 years ago

Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 62% of advertising revenue for the second quarter of 2014

Wow, that seems really high. Are other companies monetizing mobile ads like this?

sidcool2• 12 years ago

Google is at the forefront of the mobile revolution. With it's AndroidOne initiative it's going to take the developing world by storm.

umeshunni• 12 years ago

Short answer: No(t yet). Longer answer is in this article: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-Google-M...

sidcool2• 12 years ago

Quite a good quarter for FB. Shares are high.

adventured2• 12 years ago

Would anyone care to chime in on why Facebook's income tax rate is so high?

"GAAP income tax expense for the second quarter of 2014 was $595 million, representing a 43% effective tax rate. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, the non-GAAP effective tax rate would have been approximately 36%."

paul• 12 years ago

Remember when the HN consensus was that fb would never make money or be profitable? (And that mobile was unmonetizable)

Facebook Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results

Related Stories