Facebook Conference Call Highlights

Facebook FB reported its third quarter earnings. Shares of the company are down a whopping six percent. Below are some key highlights and takeaways: • We've continued to grow our community in both size and engagement with 1.35 billion people now using Facebook each month, and 64% using Facebook daily. • On mobile, 1.12 billion people now use Facebook each month and 703 million people each day, nearly 40% growth from this time last year. • Looking at our business, we continue to do well. This quarter, total revenue reached $3.2 billion and advertising revenue grew 64% year-over-year. • Mobile now accounts for 66% of our advertising revenue. Three-Year Goals: • Over the next three years, our main goals are around continuing to grow and serve our existing communities and businesses and help them reach their full potential. • When you look at the size and engagement of our community, our progress remains very strong. • 864 million people use Facebook every day; • For example, around 700 million people now use Facebook groups every month. • Achieving this scale, shows that we're delivering experiences for the way that people want to share and connect. • This quarter, we've continued to build on our results, and there are now more than 1 billion interactions every week between public figures and their fans on Facebook. • The investments we've made in video have also played a big part here. • This quarter, we announced a new milestone for video on Facebook, achieving 1 billion video views, a day of native videos. • During the summer's ice bucket challenge, there were more than 10 billion video views by 440 million people. Instagram: • Instagram has also made a lot of progress this quarter. • In August, the Instagram team launched Hyperlapse, a standalone app for time-lapsed videos on iOS. • The team has also invested heavily in improving the speed and performance of Instagram on Android. • This has helped drive Instagram's strong international growth, which in some countries has achieved more than 100% year-over-year growth. • Globally, people using Instagram now spend around 21 minutes a day on average using the app. • This is a strong figure compared to the industry and a good sign that Instagram strategy is on the right path. • Our other big focus over the next three years is to continue serving businesses well and creating a lot of value for marketers. • We've worked to improve the quality of ads in News Feed by reducing low quality content and improving our targeting to show more timely and relevant content. • We've also made some big advances in our ad tech. • Most importantly, the launch of our new Atlas platform. • Atlas offers marketers a lot of new capabilities to help reach people across devices, platforms and publishers, as well as improving measurement of online campaigns. Five-year Strategy: • Over the next five years, our goals are around taking our next-generation of services, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Search and helping them connect billions. • One big priority for us here is messaging and continuing to build and grow Messenger and now WhatsApp as well as great services. • This quarter, we made an important change to our mobile messaging efforts by transitioning people to Messenger on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. • We believe that this change allows us to offer a better and faster messaging experience on mobile and our data shows that people who use Messenger usually respond to messages about 20% faster. • This month, we also completed our acquisition of WhatsApp; I'm excited to be working with this team and for Jan to join our board. • WhatsApp continues to be on a path to connect more than a billion people. • Another key part of our strategy is helping developers to build more great social experiences on our platform. • Over the next few years, our goal is to make Facebook the cross-platform platform that allows developers to build, grow and monetize their apps across every major mobile platform. Financials and Progress: • We saw strong performance around the world, as well as across verticals and our four marketer segments; brands, direct marketers, developers and small and medium businesses. • In Q3, we re-launched Atlas, closed our acquisition of LiveRail and rolled out our Audience Network. • Today, the average adult in the U.S. spends nearly 25% of their media time on mobile, but advertisers spend only about 11% of their budgets there. • Q3 was a solid quarter across the board. • We had strong revenue growth, generated $766 million in free cash flow and continued to make investments to position us for long-term growth. • 864 million people used Facebook on an average day in September, up 136 million from last year. This represents 64% of the 1.35 billion people that used Facebook during the month of September. • Mobile continues to be the core driver of our growth. • Over 1.1 billion people use Facebook on mobile during the month of September, up 250 million from last year. • In addition, we have hundreds of millions of people on mobile using Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. • Turning now to the financials; total revenue in Q3 was $3.2 billion, up 59% compared to last year, or 58% on a constant currency basis. • Total ad revenue was nearly $3 billion, up 64% compared to last year. • In Q3, the average price per ad increased 274% compared to last year. • We ended Q3 with 8,348 employees, up 44% from last year.