Facebook Q3 revenue rises 41% on advertising growth

Social networking giant Facebook reported a 41 per cent jump in third-quarter revenue, as growing advertising business and higher user base offset a rise in costs.

Revenue for the July-September period grew to $4.5 billion from $3.2 billion a year earlier, the company said.

Advertising revenue surged 45 per cent to $4.30 billion. Of this, 78 per cent came from mobile compared with 66 per cent a year earlier.

The company reported third-quarter net income attributable to shareholders of $896 million, up from $806 million a year earlier.

Facebook said it now gets more than 8 billion video views a day, double the number in April. The number of users who access the site at least once a month jumped 14 per cent from a year earlier to 1.55 billion during the quarter while daily active users increased 17 per cent to 1.01 billion.

Photo-sharing app Instagram, which was recently brought into Facebook's advertising system, has more than 400 million monthly active users. Facebook and Instagram together account for more than one in five minutes spent on mobile devices in the US. Facebook did not reveal Instagram's ad sales figures.

Facebook's total costs grew 68 per cent to $3.04 billion in the third quarter, due mainly to its heavy investments on artificial intelligence, virtual reality and its efforts to expand internet access in emerging markets.

Shares of Facebook rose about 5 per cent to an all-time high of $109.34 in after-hours trading.

India focus Responding to an analyst's question related to India, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is looking to expand its Internet.org initiative in the country.

Internet.org proposes to provide a select few internet services to people in emerging markets that do not have widespread internet access.

Zuckerberg said more than 1 million people in India who didn't otherwise had web access can now connect to the Internet through the initiative.

"We're only working with one operator currently in part of the country. So there's a lot of room to expand that and that's just a big opportunity for the internet overall and for India over the next decade and we hope to play a role in that," he said.