The Asia-Pacific is driving growth at social networking juggernaut Facebook, which posted a 50 per cent jump in fourth quarter revenue.
Facebook showed once that it is becoming one of the world's biggest media companies. The number of people who use the site every day rose to 1.23 billion from 1.04 billion a year earlier.
The biggest increase in Facebook popularity was in the Asia-Pacific, which includes China and Australia, where the number of people who use Facebook every day rose 28 per cent to 396 million. That is more than double the number of people in Canada and the US, where Facebook was founded in a Harvard University dorm room in 2004.
Some analysts were worried Facebook wouldn't be able to keep growing ad revenue quickly because it was running out of space to show ads to Facebook users, a phenomenon called "ad load".
That doesn't seem to have been a problem. Advertising revenue hit $US8.81 billion in the fourth quarter, up from from $US5.84 billion in the same period a year earlier - a huge increase for any large company. Analysts had expected $US8.51 billion in revenue.
Net profit rose to $US3.56 billion from $US1.56 billion.
The company's latest results show that one of the big trends in consumer internet use hasn't stopped: Facebook's share of revenue from mobiles rose to an astonishing 84 per cent from 80 per cent a year earlier, according to figures out Wednesday evening in the US.
Advertisers love Facebook because they can target consumers by age, sex and location. Facebook is also proving that it is skilled at getting people to use it on their mobile phones, which are the main source of information for millions of people.
Executive assistant Alex Pereyra, 35, said she used to look at Facebook ten times a day and has tried to cut back to once a day.
"I like it because I can connect with all my family overseas and it is easy to connect with people through your whole entire life," she said.
She almost always uses her mobile to read Facebook but said she doesn't know if there are ads on there and has never clicked on one.
More to come
