Facebook continues to grow at a tremendous pace. The social media company just reported its second quarter earnings at the back of some strong user numbers and climbing ad revenues. The social network reached 2 billion monthly active users in June, and has now surpassed its estimated profit and revenue for the second quarter. The social media giant has been highly successful in growing its mobile advertising space and the 2 billion users definitely add to the increased ad visibility on the platform.
Not only is Facebook seeing a surge in users and profits from the social media platform, the company is also killing it in the messaging space. Facebook owned WhatsApp now has over 1 billion daily users. In comparison, Snapchat has only 166 million daily users. In the recent past, Facebook brought many of Snapchat’s features to WhatsApp. The WhatsApp status feature, which is essentially a clone of Stories on Snapchat, has ballooned to 250 million daily active users.
During its earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed on increasing the visibility of ads on its messaging platforms. Facebook is already in the process of expanding its beta test of Messenger ads. Facebook says Messenger ads make sense as the platform engages more than 1.2 billion people every month, giving marketers the chance to expand the reach of their campaigns. “We just started putting ads on Messenger," Zuckerberg told analysts. "I want to see us move even faster."
Facebook is also betting big on videos this year. “Video will be a much bigger driver of growth in the next two to three years than Messenger,” said Zuckerberg. The company is in talks to produce original TV shows in hopes of creating a returning user base for videos just like YouTube. Facebook is expected to target audiences from the age of 13 to 34 and may start releasing episodic series starting this August. As per a recent WSJ report, Facebook will not release entire seasons at once like Netflix, but instead have a television-like weekly release. The report also says that Facebook is willing to commit as much as $3 Million per episode in production costs. Perhaps this is where Facebook will get an opportunity to start using its mid-roll ads more widely.
Compared to the same time last year, Facebook recorded a 71 percent jump in profits thanks to all its advertising efforts. Expect to see more ads coming on Facebook and its other products as time progresses.