Facebook on Thursday released its financials for the second quarter of the year, revealing that the company managed to generate a historic revenue figure — $9.32 billion — in the three-month period ending June 30. The achievement managed to surpass analyst expectations and marked a 45 percent increase in revenue year-on-year, with the Menlo Park, California-based social media giant posting a net income of $3.89 billion during the same period. The latter figure amounts to a massive increase of 71 percentage points compared to the second quarter of 2016 and indicates that Facebook’s business is still showing no major signs of slowing down, despite the fact that the company has been warning investors about such a scenario for years now. Facebook’s ad revenue could still drop over the course of this year, some of the firm’s top executives believe, with the firm finding it increasingly hard to monetize its massive user base that surpassed two billion users last month and currently stands at 2.01 billion.
According to the social media giant, two-thirds of all users are still on Facebook on a daily basis, and while its acquisition rates have declined in a significant manner in the last half a decade, the overall performance is still positive. Facebook isn’t keen on resting on its laurels and has been reinvesting its profits in a rather aggressive manner, with its research and development (R&D) spending rising to $2 billion in Q2 2016, a 30 percent year-on-year increase. Many of the company’s current projects are meant to ultimately diversify its portfolio and guarantee its sustainability in the long term; the vast majority of Facebook’s revenue still comes from selling ad space — mobile ad revenue alone reached $8 billion in Q2 2017 — and that over-reliance on advertising is something that the firm may be looking to address in the coming years.
Even if the Internet giant cannot find a reliable revenue engine that isn’t directly related to advertising in the immediate future, it is still hoping to monetize a larger number of its offerings through ads. Platforms like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all yet to reach their true potential, and the firm’s Oculus unit may improve its performance in a significant manner in the medium term.