Facebook recently announced its first quarter results for the year and the social network posted a whopping 76% jump in profits compared to the same quarter last year. But, that’s not all. Facebook is now nearing 2 billion users (1.94 billion to be exact), of the 7.5 billion strong global population. This means that nearly a quarter of the world is now on Facebook! “We had a good start to 2017,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Most new users on the platform are being added outside of North America and Europe as Facebook took various steps to expand its global reach last year. The lighter version of the Facebook app is also gaining momentum. The app called Facebook Lite recently crossed the 200 million user mark.
Speaking after the earnings announcement, Zuckerberg attributed the company’s latest endeavours, such as video streaming, the newly launched TV app, and its foray into healthcare, to the growing size of its user base. "With that foundation our next focus will be building community," he said. "There's a lot to do there."
While its profits seem to be on a stupendous rise, and its users at an all time high, Facebook has warned of slow ad revenues in the near future. Although the company grew its ad revenues by 51% this quarter, Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said that ad revenues were set to dip over the rest of 2017.
If this is the case, Facebook might not be looking to implement its mid-roll ads on a wider scale this year. Even if it rolls out video ads on a large scale in 2017, the company does not seem to be expecting an increase in revenue from them. On the upside, Facebook has a lot of interesting tech planned for the future, including its upcoming Augmented Reality features. Also on Facebook's mind right now, is the 3,000 moderators that the company plans to hire to monitor videos and other flagged reports.