What's Fueling Facebook's Growth?

The din has settled after Facebook Inc FB third-quarter results. The social networking giant reported stellar results, with both top- and bottom-line beating estimates. Monthly active users totaled 2.07 billion, exceeding forecasts and rising 16 percent year-over-year.

Facebook has been a consistent performer, growing its revenues at a scorching pace. The average revenue growth over the past 10 quarters has been 49 percent.

How is Facebook managing to maintain its top-line momentum? The question was tackled in an analysis from Statista.

Mobile advertising has been the growth engine for Facebook in recent quarters. Of the $10.3 billion in revenue Facebook reported for Q3, $8.92 billion — or roughly 87 percent — came from mobile advertising.

Source: Statista

This compares to $1.22 billion from desktop advertising and $0.19 billion from payments.

See also: Here's What The Last 12 Months Looked Like For Facebook

Facebook only began tapping into this high-potential growth driver in 2012, and since then it has accounted for more than 90 percent of ad revenue growth, according to Statista.

Another interesting take on the growth prospects for Facebook was presented by Statista.

Of the 2.07 billion MAUs, only 239 million, or about 11.5 percent, are from the North American region, including the U.S. and Canada. Yet this region contributed less than half of Facebook's total revenue.

Source: Statista

About 70 percent of the MAUs were from regions outside of North America and Europe, Statista said. These regions accounted for less than 30 percent of the total revenues.

If Facebook succeeds in monetization in Asia and emerging regions, in the form of increased average revenue per user, there is scope for the social media platform to accelerate, or at least maintain its superlative revenue growth in the quarters to come.

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