Facebook reported a 11% jump in profit for the third quarter as it witnessed a spike in revenue from ad sales. The social media giant saw revenues climb to $4.5bn (£2.9bn, €4.1bn) and claimed that its average daily users rose to more than 1 billion a day.
Revenues were up 41% as compared to the same quarter last year. The news also lifted its stock to an all-time high of $105.97 in after-hours trading on 4 November.
The numbers indicate the companys ability to attract new advertisers, who are increasing their digital ad spends. The Mark Zuckerberg-led firm also claimed that it had 2.5 million advertisers as of September, which was 25% more than what it had in February.
Its third quarter net income stood at $896m or 31 cents a share, up from last years $806m or 30 cents per share. This beat analyst expectations of $776.5m or 27 cents a share.
Brian Wieser, analyst at Pivotal Research, said: Facebook is your first port of call if youre a digital advertiser and if you have money to spend.
Meanwhile, Facebook said that revenues from mobile devices accounted for 78% of total revenues, up from 66% a year ago. However, on the downside, Facebooks projects such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and an initiative to bring internet access to emerging markets increased its expenses.
User base
The Menlo Park-headquartered firm has said that 1.55 billion users login to its website at least once a month, which has risen from 1.49 billion in the second quarter. It added that that 1.01 billion people logged in at least once a day in September.
Although, the increase in its user base came from a spike in mobile subscribers, a majority of the new users came from outside North America and Europe, which account for most of its revenues.
Average revenue per user in the US and Canada grew to $10.49 up 42%, more than thrice the global average of $2.97 and more than seven times that the Asia-Pacific, where revenue averaged at $1.39 per user.
