Facebook announced first quarter earnings yesterday, but also provided an update on user stats.
We'll get the big news out of the way first: Facebook has finally crossed the one billion mark for monthly active mobile users. According to the company, it's now up to 1.01 billion monthly active users on smartphones and tablets, an increase of 35 percent compared to the same time period last year.
Facebook defines a monthly user as someone who has, in the last 30 days, "logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, used our Messenger app, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website or application that is integrated with Facebook."
As for a mobile monthly active user, that consists of anyone who hit up Facebook's mobile application or good ol' m.facebook.com (or similar sites) on a smartphone or tablet. Separately, there are more than 200 million monthly active users of Facebook's Messenger app — this quarter being the first time that Facebook has shared specific stats for the app. That figure doesn't go into Facebook's "mobile monthly active user" count.
In other words, there are a lot of users accessing Facebook from handheld devices —a key component of Facebook's expansion plans as of late, and one that's expected to allow the company to reach second-place status in the mobile advertising market. According to EMarketer, as reported by Bloomberg, Facebook is expected to eat up 22 percent of the mobile ad market in 2014. That's 22 percent of $31.5 billion, putting Facebook right behind first-place Google, which is expected to fall to from 49 percent to 47 percent.
In total, Facebook has 1.28 billion monthly active users (a 15 percent increase since the same time period last year). Daily active users are up to 802 million, an increase of 21 percent from last year. Of these. 609 million are mobile daily active users (an increase of 43 percent).
On average, Facebook makes about $2 for every user, split into $1.81 from advertising and $0.19 from any kind of Facebook-related payments. That number is a wee bit lower than last quarter's peak of $2.14 (split $1.94 and $0.20, respectively). Users in the U.S. and Canada contribute most to Facebook's revenues per user on average ($5.85 in advertising and $0.69 in payments), whereas users outside of the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia contribute the least ($0.70 and $0.02, respectively).