Facebook has a stellar Q3 with revenue and usage despite drooping teen usage

Facebook's stock looks like it’s finally emerging from the year-long IPO trauma that it faced, with the social networking website’s third-quarter results seeing it surpass analyst expectations. The company released its third-quarter figures, announcing $2.02 billion in revenue and earnings of 25 cents a share, beating expectations of $1.91 billion in revenue with 18 to 19 cents a share.

The company also announced that it has now passed 1.19 billion monthly active users and saw 728 million daily active users on an average during September 2013. Mobile is turning out to be one of Facebook’s strongest points with the number of monthly active users from the mobile platform coming up to 874 million. Essentially, a whopping 73.44 percent of Facebook’s total user base accesses its services from a mobile device. This comes at a growth rate of 45 percent from 2012.

Beating expectations (Background Image Credit: Getty Images)

As far as revenue generation goes, mobile seems to be doing exceedingly well here too. Facebook said that 41 percent of its revenue came from mobile, up by a massive 31 percent compared to the previous quarter. A proud Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO said in a statement, “We’ve made good progress growing our community, deepening engagement and delivering strong financial results, especially on mobile. The work we’ve done to make mobile the best Facebook experience is showing good results and provides us with a solid foundation for the future.”

With all these impressive figures, Facebook seems to be having one major concern – its hold on teenagers seems to be fading. In a candid admission, Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman said, “Our best analysis on youth engagement in the US reveals that usage of Facebook among US teens overall was stable from Q2 to Q3, but we did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens.”

While Ebersman admitted that there isn’t an entirely accurate way in which teenagers’ activity can be measured on Facebook, thanks to multiple issues like privacy and false information, the company seems to have a system in place to track some usage data by teens. Recently Facebook announced a new controversial policy which opened up the social network for teens, allowing them to use it just like any adult user. Many saw this as an effort to get more teenagers interested in the network. We'll have to wait until the next quarter to see if that move has had any impact in teen usage patterns.

(With inputs from agencies)