Facebook Financial Report: Facebook's revenue in Q4 2012 was $1.585 billion, a year-on-year increase of 40%

Facebook's daily active user growth

Facebook today released its fourth quarter and full year financial results for the period ended December 31, 2012 , with some important data on the social network, including the first time that the number of daily active mobile users exceeded the number of daily active web users. Facebook has been focusing on developing social networks using mobile devices and platforms, but such rapid mobile user growth is still impressive.

For long-time Facebook observers, this shift has long been obvious. People are increasingly checking Facebook messages on their mobile devices, skipping the desktop version entirely. It's a behavior shift that Facebook is leading, and it's clearly a smart move.

In the third quarter of 2011, Facebook had 457 million daily active users, which grew to 483 million in the fourth quarter of 2011. After entering 2012, Facebook's daily active users continued to grow, reaching 526 million, 552 million, and 584 million in the first three quarters, and growing to 618 million in the fourth quarter.

Facebook's monthly active users also continued to grow. In the fourth quarter of 2011, Facebook's monthly active users were 845 million, of which 432 million were mobile users and 58 million were pure mobile users. In the first three quarters of 2012, Facebook's monthly active users were 901 million, 955 million, and 1 billion, respectively; of which mobile users were 488 million, 543 million, and 604 million, respectively; and the number of pure mobile users continued to grow from 83 million to 102 million and 126 million. By the fourth quarter of 2012, Facebook's monthly active users had grown to 1.1 billion, of which 680 million were mobile users and 157 million were pure mobile users.

All of these figures do not include Instagram, the photo-sharing social network that Facebook acquired.

Facebook's monthly active user growth

While announcing these data, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also issued a statement: "In 2012, we connected more than 1 billion people and became a mobile company. We entered 2013 with great momentum and will continue to invest to achieve our mission and become a stronger and more valuable company."

According to Facebook's fourth quarter 2012 financial report, in terms of revenue, mobile business accounted for 23% of advertising revenue, higher than 14% in the third quarter of 2012. At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September last year, Zuckerberg predicted that one day Facebook would be able to generate more revenue from mobile users. Although it has not yet been realized, this trend of transformation has been fully launched. At that time, Zuckerberg said: "We will fulfill this mission to connect the world and build long-term value. The bigger question to judge how we perform is how we use mobile."

In the conference call after the earnings report was released, Zuckerberg also discussed the power of mobile. He said: "This allows us to reach more people, and these users are more willing to interact, and we can definitely get more revenue from these users. Mobile creates a more vibrant ecosystem." Zuckerberg also discussed Facebook's new initiatives to create mobile-first applications and features. As Facebook continues to try new features, these initiatives have become the focus of many people.

Facebook's financial report shows that the fourth quarter revenue was $1.585 billion, a year-on-year increase of 40%; the fourth quarter net profit was $64 million, with earnings per share of $0.03, a sharp drop of 78.8% from $302 million and earnings per share of $0.14 in the same period last year; advertising revenue in the fourth quarter was $1.33 billion, accounting for 84% of total revenue, a year-on-year increase of 41%. For the whole year of 2012, Facebook's revenue was $5.089 billion, a 37% increase from $3.711 billion in the previous year; the full-year net profit was $53 million, with earnings per share of $0.01, a sharp drop of 94.7% from $1 billion or $0.46 per share in 2011.