More Than 500 Million Users Access Facebook Only on Mobile Devices

Facebook reported fourth-quarter profits of $701m (£462m), a 34% increase on the same period a year ago. It seems to have taken over the small screen in the last quarter.

What’s interesting is that more than half the billion Facebook users access the site from mobile devices. The company also noted a 13% percent increase in active users since previous months, which means almost 1.39 billion people use Facebook actively every month on an average.

The social media giant isn’t signing up new users the way it once did, but the social network is generating a lot more revenue from each user. Facebook generated $3.59 billion from advertising overall in the fourth quarter of 2014, and 69% of that came from mobile ads rather than their desktop version.

Also, the company has invested a lot of money on R&D, precisely triple the amount the company spent in the previous quarter. That includes several high profile acquisitions such as Instagram, WhatsApp and virtual-reality headset maker Oculus Rift, as well as its own in-house messaging products and video services.

Major part of Facebook research and development is said to focus on mobile ads. Facebook and companies like it have been working hard to figure out how to adjust and make mobile ads that will click better with the audience. Internet users are increasingly flocking from browsing on PCs, where banner ads have long reigned, to using mobile browsers and apps, where traditional online ads haven’t worked as well.

The latest of Facebook’s mobile experiments is a platform called Audience network launched in October that lets brands tap into the social giant’s enormous user data to advertise to Facebook users while they’re in other apps.