Facebook 2016 Q4 Earnings Report: Facebook Earnings, Profit And Userbase On The Rise

Facebook is already the biggest social network in the world, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any smaller. According to the company’s earnings report from the fourth quarter of 2016, Facebook now boasts nearly two billion active users—and plenty of profit to go along with it.

Facebook now boasts a massive 1.86 billion monthly active users, a 17 percent increase in year-over-year figures. 1.23 billion people check the service every day.

Mobile users marked an area of considerable growth for Facebook, with the vast majority of its users viewing the site on smartphones and tablets. 1.15 billion check Facebook via mobile device each day, and 1.74 do so each month—both of those figures mark a more than 20 percent increase in activity on those devices.

The user base wasn’t the only thing that grew for Facebook on mobile—the company saw a boost in advertising revenue coming from the platform. Facebook reported 84 percent of its total ad revenue came from mobile.

That growth was indicative of the company’s overall earnings, which were on the rise across the board. The company $8.63 billion in revenue, beating Wall Street estimates of $8.31 billion. Even better for the massive company was its $3.56 billion in reported profit, a 177 percent growth year-over-year.

The earnings report brings a bit of good news to a company that has continually been in the public crosshairs. Facebook came under fire following the 2016 U.S. Presidential election after reports that fake news stories were spread widely across the platform.

That followed a report earlier in the year that the company’s human editors had engaged in political bias and censoring conservative websites while curating the trending news stories that appeared on the site.

The earnings report also come hot on the heels of the social network losing a major lawsuit revolving around Oculus, the virtual reality platform the company purchased for $2 billion in 2014.

In the case, Media company ZeniMax sued Oculus for allegedly improperly using code that was used in the Oculus Rift VR headset. The court found that Oculus wasn’t guilty of stealing trade secrets, but did find Oculus executives violated non-disclosure agreements. The court awarded ZeniMax $500 million in total for the case.

That figure isn’t expected to put much of a damper on Facebook’s overall earnings. The company was up more than two percent in after hours trading following its report.