Facebook has officially posted up their results for the first quarter of 2017, and the highlights, including just over $8 billion in gross revenue, are quite impressive. Costs and expenses ate up over half of that gross revenue figure, but even after taxes, the Menlo Park web giant still managed to post net revenue of $3.06 billion. Ad revenue was the lion’s share of that total revenue figure, and ad revenue from mobile platforms made up 85% of that. On the financial side of things, it all boiled down to total earnings of $1.04 million per share, but finance was only part of the picture for the quarter. During that period, Facebook saw its total user count hit the 1.9 billion mark, with over 1.3 billion of those users active on a daily basis.
The massive user count didn’t come cheap; Facebook spent $1.27 billion in capital for the quarter, though they didn’t disclose exactly where all of that money went. With an employee headcount of 18,770, it’s quite obvious that payroll lies elsewhere, meaning that all of that money was paid out for things like content licenses, hardware purchases, and related buildout. Cash on hand, along with cash equivalents, securities, and the like totaled up to a mind-blowing $32.31 billion in total tangible assets for the company, separate from their far higher total worth, currently reflected by a market cap of $440.74 billion.
In a post following up on the release of the first quarter results, Mark Zuckerberg talked a bit about goals and milestones that Facebook has hit, as well as the future of the company. According to Zuckerberg, primary goals for the time being include expanding virtual reality and augmented reality, mostly through Oculus, and to help the site’s users build up communities. According to Zuckerberg, over 100 million Facebook members are currently part of groups that he terms “meaningful,” and he would like to see that number grow. Specifically, he wants to see it hit 1 billion. He also posted up an infographic, seen below, that includes a few milestones, such as the aforementioned 1.9 billion active user figure, similar figures for Facebook’s other apps and platforms, and the insane data speeds that their tech team managed to beam from ground to air.