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Facebook Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results
- aaronbrethorst 12y agoMobile 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.
- msoad 12y agoWait for Google with their subsidized Android One phones in India and China to see more than 1/7th...
- julianpye 12y agoNo Facebook in China. Facebook mostly faces political growth limits right now...
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoNo G+ in China either.
- b0ard 12y agoThat's probably the wrong way to interpret that number. Many people have multiple devices (phones/tablets) and people have multiple accounts as well. Still an impressive number nonetheless, even if it was 1/10th of the world's population...
- chmullig 12y agoNo, the original was correct. That's 1.07B distinct people. Crazier, IMO, is the DAU. 829 million log in EVERY DAY.
- DannyBee 12y agoAnd how many are spam? (I get friended by 3 clearly fake facebook accounts a week at this point ...)
- Chronic29 12y agoEven if 200 million are spam, I'm still impressed
- tptacek 12y agoThat is weird. As these things go, I'm reasonably high profile. I'm also connected to some vertices of extremely high degree. I get zero fake friend requests per week. Twitter? Flooded with fake connections. Facebook? I can't remember the last one I saw.
- patio11 12y agoIt can depend a bit on geography. Facebook.jp has a suspiciously high number of attractive young ladies in Ogaki (as in, literally, more than the number of 18 to 22 year old young ladies in Ogaki) who send friend requests for, I assume, the purpose of developing marks for scams. I'm also one degree of separation from two countries in Southeast Asia and this causes me to get a lot of friend requests of dubious provenance.
- rsivapr 12y agoI 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-fake-accounts/ http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-media/facebook-fak... 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 12y agoWho has duplicate accounts on Facebook?
- mbell 12y agoEvery social media employee? I would guess most have separate personal accounts and accounts used to manage their company's pages.
- hsod 12y agohow many social media employees do you think there are? do you think it's a significant number at this scale?
- cpa 12y agoI'm not sure that has a significant impact on the numbers :)
- GregorStocks 12y agoThat'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.)
- WhitneyLand 12y agoAnd yet increasing their revenue 7x still wouldn't let them match Google financially. What they've achieved is no doubt impressive but there is still a lot to figure out in the model to extract as much as possible from all those users.
- adventured 12y agoClose. GOOG sales: $16b for the latest quarter; FB sales: $2.9b; 5.5 fold difference GOOG net income: $3.39b; FB net income: $791m; 3.84 fold difference
- cliveowen 12y agoAlso, Facebook was founded 6 years after Google. I think Facebook is following the same trajectory if not doing better than Google at the time.
- TrainedMonkey 12y agoAre they including Whats App users in that number? Because that would help explain it.
- charlesma 12y agoThe whatsapp deal hasn't closed, so no. I don't think the numbers include instagram either, it hasn't been monetized and therefore irrelevant to financials. Edit: Confirmed, doesn't include instagram users. In the earnings slides http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/3349527922x0x770372/fccb3097-dcf3-42a6-9076-ff0fa00421b6/FB%20Q2'14%20Earnings%20Slides%2020140722%2012p.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/3349527922... > The number of DAUs, mobile DAUs, MAUs, and mobile MAUs do not include Instagram users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users, respectively, based on their other activities on Facebook.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rahimnathwani 12y agoIt doesn't necessarily mean that. 2/7ths of the world's population logging in to FB once every two months would result in the same MAU number, even with zero people logging on _every_ month. Moreover, these MAU numbers probably include people like me, who receive a push notification of a message sent to a group, click it once to view the message, and quit the app after 2 seconds. It's still a large number, though!
- wozniacki 12y agoIs 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-social-mobile-2.png http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/12/nielsen-... Note: Asked in the other duplicate post, as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077054
- Aqueous 12y agoWow. They really knocked it out of the park. 829 million DAU - I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account.
- carb 12y agowhy was this downvoted?
- bertil 12y agoThe 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 12y agoI 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.
- Igglyboo 12y agoThese 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 12y agoDo these DAU/MAU numbers include WhatsApp users?
- lolwhatisthis 12y agoThey 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.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoEven more impressive when you consider that the world's largest country of internet users doesn't even have access to Facebook.
- cliveowen 12y agoI'm pretty sure they count every single minor interaction as a log-in. You receive a notification on your phone and then swipe it away? That's an interaction.
- Igglyboo 12y ago829 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 12y agoIt's hard to answer this easily in a holistic fashion without getting really abstract. Is there a particular part you're wondering about?
- tristanz 12y agoWhat'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.
- Igglyboo 12y agoJust like a high level overview of there setup, I'd assume they would do more sophisticated things than just throwing more hardware at the problem(millions of servers vs thousands).
- melvinmt 12y agoStart here: http://highscalability.com/blog/category/facebook http://highscalability.com/blog/category/facebook
- threeseed 12y agoAs of June last year they had hundreds of thousands of machines. As for the architecture it is basically a PHP app in front of a massive fleet of Memcached instances and a few databases here and there specifically for different apps e.g. photos, messages etc.
- nbm 12y agoThat is a bit simplistic and is missing a bunch of things. First the numerous C++ and Java backend services that do most of the heavy lifting like producing the feed, doing searches (of various types, both from what people type in, and internal ones), sending and receiving messages, spam and fake account detection, &c. The PHP portion acts as a front-end to these services. TAO is the graph caching system that has largely replaced memcache at Facebook. Just on the traffic side, there is the global traffic management system (for dynamic and for static content), different types of load balancers, CDN-specific caching software, image and video transcoding/encoding, &c. And that's just the stuff involved in the production path - there are all sorts of behind-the-scenes things that do async work of various types - either as soon as possible (video encoding, updating) or on a daily or whatever cadence to update infrequently-changing things.
- beartime 12y agosuck it HN haters
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jmduke 12y agoFacebook is the only web site on which I can simultaneously (or at least near-simultaneously) look at my college roommate's pictures from Athens while writing a letter to my Grandma and videochatting my long-distance girlfriend. Facebook, for me, has a monopoly on bidirectional communication.
- yid 12y agoPerhaps 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 12y agohttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/to-catch-a-trader/preet-bharara-insider-trading-is-rampant-on-wall-street/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-fin...
- iblaine 12y agoThe 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.
- andys627 12y agoDo they measure how many people load a like button on a 3rd party site?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kenjackson 12y agoMobile 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?
- sidcool 12y agoGoogle is at the forefront of the mobile revolution. With it's AndroidOne initiative it's going to take the developing world by storm.
- umeshunni 12y agoShort answer: No(t yet). Longer answer is in this article: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-Google-Mobile-Ad-Market-Soars-10537-2013/1010690 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-Google-M...
- sidcool 12y agoQuite a good quarter for FB. Shares are high.
- adventured 12y agoWould 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%."
- paul 12y agoRemember when the HN consensus was that fb would never make money or be profitable? (And that mobile was unmonetizable) :)