
Facebook Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results - antr
http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=861599
======
aaronbrethorst

        Mobile MAUs were 1.07 billion as of June 30, 2014,
        an increase of 31% year-over-year. 
    

That's crazy. 1/7th of the world's population logs in to Facebook from a
mobile device at least once a month.

~~~
rsivapr
I would think it's fair assumption that a significant percentage of those
users are being counted multiple times if they have duplicate accounts.

EDIT: I don't see how the above statement beckons downvotes. Yes. It was an
assumption, but not absurd one at that. Here's one such article that talks
about fake accounts -- [http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-
media/facebook-fak...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-
media/facebook-fake-accounts/)

EDIT2: Last year Facebook said 4.8% of their MAU was duplicate, misclassified,
or spam accounts. That's 51+ million today assuming the percentage has
remained constant.

~~~
ihsw
Who has duplicate accounts on Facebook?

~~~
mbell
Every social media employee? I would guess most have separate personal
accounts and accounts used to manage their company's pages.

~~~
GregorStocks
That's not how Facebook Pages work - a Page isn't an account you log into,
it's something your main Facebook account can have admin rights to (and a Page
can have multiple administrators). I have admin rights on a few Facebook Pages
but I only count as a single active user, and I don't have to log out of my
Gregor account to administer them.

Historically, some brands did create full Facebook accounts, but Facebook now
discourages that and as far as I know most brands are using Pages now. For a
while Zuck's dog, Beast, was a notable exception (he had a Facebook account
long after that was discouraged) but it looks like he's just got a Page now.

(I used to work at Facebook.)

~~~
nbm
I don't recall Beast ever having anything but a Page - in fact, I remember
that Zuck mentioning in a Q&A that he was using Beast to get a better feeling
about what it's like to run a Page.

~~~
GregorStocks
Could be - I think my memory of the non-Page account dates to mid-2011, and
that's plenty long enough ago for my memory to play tricks on me.

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Igglyboo
These numbers are seriously mind boggling a DAU count of 829 million is close
to 1/8th of the worlds population. Even more impressive when you consider the
fact that only about 3 billion even have internet access.

~1/3 of the people on the planet with internet access are logging into
Facebook every. single. day.

~~~
ozgune
Do these DAU/MAU numbers include WhatsApp users?

~~~
lolwhatisthis
They said the WhatsApp deal would close later this year, implying it hasn't
yet finalized, so I would imagine this does not include those numbers.

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wozniacki
Is there a universally agreed metric of what a mobile MAU constitutes?

Is there a generally agreed unit of time spent per instance of log in
activity, to qualify as a MAU?

Or just the very act of stumbling into the FB app (somehow), through the
myriad ways possible out there, still constitute a MAU?

I understand that this does not count (?) API calls (justifiably).

All these years in, I just want to assure myself that we are still not in the
era of sketchy metrics and non-standard parameters.

For example this Nielsen graphic is from 2012 and shows time spent, on social
networking broadly, in HH:MM

[http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/12/nielsen-...](http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/12/nielsen-
social-mobile-2.png)

Note: Asked in the other duplicate post, as well.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077054)

------
yid
Perhaps someone could explain to me in simple terms why FB's stock has been
surging for the past week (and is currently $75 in after-hours). Did people
have an "inkling" about the financials?

~~~
jliptzin
[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-
fin...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-
crisis/to-catch-a-trader/preet-bharara-insider-trading-is-rampant-on-wall-
street/)

------
Igglyboo
829 million DAU translates to roughly 10k users logging in a second, I can't
even imagine how many requests that translates to. Can someone explain how
their infrastructure works so they can manage this? I literally cannot fathom
a system to handle this that isn't multiple millions of servers.

~~~
nbm
It's hard to answer this easily in a holistic fashion without getting really
abstract. Is there a particular part you're wondering about?

~~~
tristanz
What's the trend around external vs. eventual consistency at Facebook? I ask
this comparing eventual consistency in TOA and Google's shift towards external
consistency in Spanner.

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kenjackson
_Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 62% of advertising
revenue for the second quarter of 2014_

Wow, that seems really high. Are other companies monetizing mobile ads like
this?

~~~
umeshunni
Short answer: No(t yet). Longer answer is in this article:
[http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-
Google-M...](http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-Google-
Mobile-Ad-Market-Soars-10537-2013/1010690)

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iblaine
The sarcastic side of me would like to say that facebooks success is due to
the recent increase in embedded video links in the news feeds. The videos are
annoying. But FBs reach is increasingly impressive. Surely that's the driver.

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adventured
Would anyone care to chime in on why Facebook's income tax rate is so high?

"GAAP income tax expense for the second quarter of 2014 was $595 million,
representing a 43% effective tax rate. Excluding share-based compensation and
related payroll tax expenses, the non-GAAP effective tax rate would have been
approximately 36%."

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andys627
Do they measure how many people load a like button on a 3rd party site?

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paul
Remember when the HN consensus was that fb would never make money or be
profitable? (And that mobile was unmonetizable)

:)

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sidcool
Quite a good quarter for FB. Shares are high.

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Aqueous
Wow. They really knocked it out of the park.

829 million DAU - I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account.

~~~
carb
why was this downvoted?

~~~
bertil
The part "I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account." probably
came off as irrelevant and poorly worded to some users. I'm actually not sure
how to connect personal emotion and not being part of a popular option.

~~~
Aqueous
I was joking and not trying to be obnoxious, but I suppose it came off that
way. I was more commenting on the impressive gravitational pull of something
that has a good chunk of the world's population using it. To a very non-
trivial percentage of the globe Facebook is a vital utility and communications
tool. That's impressive, considering the turn-over rate of other popular
social networks that are or nearly are defunct.

The fact that their revenue is growing, and not shrinking, is astonishing
given that a couple years ago people were counting down the days until
Facebook dropped off the leaderboard.

