By Thomas Halleck -Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is expected to report enormous second-quarter revenue growth as the world’s largest social network benefited from advertising tied to the recently completed World Cup and the introduction of its mobile ad network.
The Menlo Park, California, company, which reports Wednesday after the markets close, will announce earnings per share of 32 cents on revenue of $2.81 billion, a 55 percent increase over the year-earlier level, according to analysts polled by Thomson Reuters Eikon.
Out of 1.3 billion total users, Facebook has more than a billion active users every month on mobile. Mobile advertising now accounts for the majority of Facebook’s ad revenue, showing the world’s largest social network has more successfully transitioned to mobile advertising than other Silicon Valley giants.
Two years after its disastrous initial public offering, Facebook has dusted itself off. With 1.3 billion users, Facebook’s competitors are having trouble keeping up. Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) sees its user growth becoming stagnant at 250 million.
FB has come a long way since its disastrous IPO. The company's stock is at an all time high, and analysts expect the social network to pull in record revenue for the second quarter." title="© Reuters. Facebook Inc. NASDAQ:FB has come a long way since its disastrous IPO. The company's stock is at an all time high, and analysts expect the social network to pull in record revenue for the second quarter." rel="external-image">
The World Cup was a boon to the Facebook's second-quarter advertising, Max Kalehoff, senior vice president of SocialCode, a Facebook marketing partner, said to InsideFacebook on Tuesday.
“Second quarter continued the same triple-digit growth we saw in the first quarter. Our portfolio of Fortune 500 advertisers nearly doubled total spend with us in the second quarter versus the first quarter,” Kalehoff said. “We saw a lot of investment around the winter Olympics, but the World Cup was a whole different scale.”
Analysts say that Facebook’s success could be due in part to the growth in digital advertising industry wide, as well as the introduction of its mobile ad network. The company has also had success with advertisements that allow users to install new apps from directly within Facebook’s, although its WhatsApp acquisition has not yet been completed.