Today, not that much has changed.

After debuting close to $40 and cratering to just under $18 in August, the stock has somewhat stabilized in the $25 region, down 30 percent from its opening-day high. And along the way, the story emerged of how Facebook tried to hide some of the mobile risk inherent in its business and how the company panicked and botched its IPO by using vague positive language in its public prospectus and, apparently, specific negative information about slowing revenue growth to institutional investors privately.

Not to mention the $100 million paid to banks to stabilize the stock — on top of $176 million in IPO fees — for efforts that ultimately failed. And technical glitches that cost the NASDAQ $62 million in compensatory fees.

All of which negatively affected the overall IPO market.

That all said, however, Facebook has seemingly nicely recovered from the disaster — at least from a business fundamentals perspective. Revenue growth was strong in its latest quarterly earnings release, with the company booking $1.46 billion in revenue for Q1 2013, compared to about $1 billion a year ago. More importantly, mobile was significantly up, accounting for 30 percent of ad revenues, and Facebook singlehandedly accounted for 6.5 percent of all online ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty good nevertheless.

And the company has massively beefed up its advertising options. It’s now posting retargeted ads right in the news feed, once sacrosanct territory. And in a move aimed directly at advertising giant Google, Facebook has launched a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to target its users based on what they actually buy and want to buy offline … which is a significant move to targeting the intent graph that Google hits so well by virtue of being a search engine, but Facebook has often missed since its visitors are on the site to meet and greet people. In addition, as soon as July, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads in the news feed, a product that it will be charging major brands millions of dollars for.

All of which is having an effect.

The consensus recommendation for Facebook is currently a buy, with a price target of $34. Most analysts are in the Strong Buy category, with few or none in the dreaded Underperform or Sell slots. And in the past four weeks, analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward by a factor of 6 to 1.

So there’s a lot of positive in Facebook’s future, and there’s a ton of potential. But it’s still challenging when analysts compare Facebook stock with other internet high-fliers like LinkedIn or Yelp, which rose 148 percent and 48 percent in their first years, respectively.

But at least it’s better than Groupon and Zynga, both down around 75-80 percent.

And, I would argue, while there are a ton of challenges and many very significant competitors — primarily Google — the future for Facebook is bright.

Even if the public start was a stubbed toe.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It looks like Facebook’s huge mobile risk is turning into a huge mobile opportunity.

The social network reported astounding mobile growth today, with 750 million monthly active users on mobile devices (a 54 percent increase from last year). That’s a significant chunk of the 1.1 billion monthly users Facebook saw during the quarter.

Even better, Facebook reported ad revenues of $1.25 billion for the quarter (up 43 percent form last year), 30 percent of which came from mobile ads. That’s around $375 million in revenues from mobile ads alone. Not bad for a company that was previously worried about its capability to make a buck on mobile.

Facebook also noted that 189 million people only accessed it on mobile devices. It’s hard to read much into that number now, but this shows a significant amount of reach for Facebook with young people who don’t spend as much time on computers (or people without access to computers in general).

It’ll be interesting to see how the launch of Facebook Home last month will affect Facebook’s mobile performance going forward. Right now Home is only available on select Android devices, but as it reaches more phones and countries, it could have a big impact on mobile ad revenue (since it’s basically making Facebook’s ads a part of your phone’s home screen).

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Facebook has for some time been focusing on getting its network into the hands of all Earthlings, be they tech sophisticates in urban centers or nomadic herdsmen in South Sudan.

“We want to give everyone in the world the power to share,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the company’s quarterly earnings phone call today. “The big question for us is, which areas are growing the fastest? … Whatever the form factor is going forward, we’ll be able to deliver.”

This has meant a big push to put usable Facebook applications on all kinds of phones, including feature phones, and today we learned a bit about the payoff.

As part of its earnings presentation, Facebook rolled out a new statistic that shows how well it’s doing on this front. It said it’s got a grand total of 189 million “mobile-only monthly active users (MAUs),” a number that’s been on the rise for a while:

According to Facebook, these users “are mobile MAUs that accessed Facebook solely through mobile apps or our mobile website.”

In all likelihood, if you go a full month as a Facebook user without touching Facebook.com on the desktop, it means one thing: You don’t have access to a desktop/laptop computer, and your phone is your sole connection to the web.

That means that nearly 200 million people are on Facebook every month without using a computer. These probably aren’t all super-hip young folks who are too cool for laptops; we’re likely also talking about people around the world who may never have access to desktop computers due to their prohibitive costs.

“We’ve sent a team of people around the world to see what they use, and we care about everybody, not just you guys,” Facebooker Peter Deng said to a room full of tech press and analysts in a recent chat on the company’s approach to mobile apps and the mobile web.

“Faebook really represents an opportunity to connect over 900 million people,” said engineering director Doug Purdy at the same event, “but we hope one day for it to be the entire world.”

Facebook announced its quarterly earnings today: $1.46 billion in revenue for the first three months of 2013. This shows a slight dip from earnings last quarter but a year-over-year increase of around 38 percent.

(We’ve included the company’s full Q1 presentation below.)

One of the more interesting aspects of the hard numbers, however, is the company’s continuing capability to gain traction outside the U.S. — and make money based on that traction.

Ads made up the majority of that figure, with just $213 million coming from payments and other fees, including the still-new Facebook Gifts.

More than half of Facebook’s revenue comes from international sources, with $679 million of all revenue coming from U.S. sources and $552 million of ad revenue coming from the United States and Canada.

Daily active users are up to 665 million; around one quarter of all daily active users are in North America (U.S. and Canada). When it comes to monthly active users, the network tops 1.1 billion souls, with less than 20 percent of that number coming from the U.S. and Canada.

As far as mobile goes, the company claims a growing number of monthly active users on mobile: 751 million, to be precise, up from 680 just last quarter. In fact, Facebook shows 189 million mobile-only MAUs — folks who only access Facebook via their phones.

For mobile revenue, the company said, “Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 30 percent of advertising revenue for the first quarter of 2013.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in today’s earnings call that Home, its Android skin launched in April, is still in its infancy but will be pushed out more broadly within the next few months.

Here’s a look at the company’s revenue each quarter between 2011 and today:

Ad revenue

A lot of that revenue comes from advertising. Ads analyst firm eMarketer said in an email that while Google continues to dominate the online ad market, Facebook is on the rise, taking home 6.5 percent of all online advertising dollars spent in the U.S. this year, up by .6 percent since last year.

And one shining moment in that growth is mobile, which made up a full 30 percent of the company’s quarterly earnings. As eMarketer reps pointed out via email, “Last year Facebook — after its first year of selling mobile ads — became the No. 2 mobile ad publisher, by revenue, behind Google.” In 2013, Facebook may end up capturing as much as 13 percent of all U.S. mobile ad spend, which itself makes up a $7.29 billion marketplace.

Even more exciting, eMarketer says, is Facebook Exchange, the company’s real-time ad-bidding platform.

“Real-time bidding is a fast-growing market; eMarketer estimates U.S. advertisers will spend more than $3.36 billion on real-time bidding this year, up from just under $2 billion in 2012 and less than $1 billion in 2011,” a firm rep stated, noting that Facebook is “well-positioned” to succeed in this market.

Share prices

At this writing, stock ticker symbol FB is trading at $27.39. Here’s a look at the company’s stock price over the past six months and since its debut:

Compared to other large, well-established tech companies, Facebook is performing near the top of the class when you consider price percentage change over the past six months:

However, if you look at some of the newer tech stock debuts over the past year, you’ll see a precipitous slide following Facebook’s disastrous IPO, followed by a slow recovery:

Facebook Earnings

Facebook’s earnings just hit the wire, showing $1.585 billion for the quarter and a grand total of $5.1 billion for all of 2012, narrowly beating estimates of $5 billion.

But the real standout line item was mobile advertising revenue — the most hotly anticipated and debated figure in Facebook’s books and the one where Facebook far outstripped any forecasts.

Here’s a quarter-by-quarter look at Facebook’s revenues over the past two years:

Obviously, the majority of this comes from advertising — and with its new Graph Search, Facebook is poised to take an even larger share of that market from reigning champion Google. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbrg said in today’s earnings call that he considers Graph Search the company’s most important product from the past 12 months and that he looks forward to building Graph Search into a meaningful part of Facebook’s business.

Online ads in the U.S. were a $10 billion market in Q4 2012, with Facebook taking home $1.33 billion of that — 13.3 percent of the total market. Advertising made up 84 percent of the company’s total revenue and increased 41 percent year-over-year for Q4.

News Feed ads “turned out even better than we thought,” said Zuckerberg. He said the company is working on more innovative and effective ad products. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also noted that 65 percent of Facebook’s advertisers are using News Feed ads, which also run in mobile interfaces.

Mobile ads and revenues

As for mobile figures, mobile monthly active users were up to 680 million at the end of 2012, a 57 percent hike year-over-year. Mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4 — a (relatively) huge $306 million.

While the analysts at eMarketer pretty much nailed their figures for 2012 revenues, they were surprised at how fast the social network’s mobile revenue has grown.

“The company outperformed expectations again — by a wide margin,” an eMarketer told VentureBeat today via email. “With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin.”

Facebook’s entry into mobile advertising was a big part of the entire segment’s boom last year, an overall 180 percent increase in mobile ad spend in the United States.

eMarketer estimates that Facebook took home more U.S. mobile display revenue than any other mobile ad publisher in 2012, up to and including rival Google. The firm estimates Facebook earned 18.4 percent of the total U.S. mobile display ad market, up from 17 percent last year.

“The social networking giant offered no mobile ad opportunities at the beginning of 2012 but grew its mobile business at an astonishing — and unexpected — rate,” said an eMarketer rep.

“Before Facebook’s Q3 earnings call, most researchers and analysts expected U.S. mobile ad revenues of roughly $45 to $100 million, according to figures examined by eMarketer. While the company’s total ad revenues were, for the most part, unsurprising, the share of revenues attributed to mobile advertising was far from it.”

Share prices

Analysts had previously forecast Facebook’s 2012 revenues at $5 billion, a significant decrease from a previous $6 billion estimate. Facebook had underperformed analysts’ expectations in the first two quarters of 2012, and with the downgraded annual revenue estimate, share prices dipped below $18.

This morning, the company’s shares were trading at $31.28, their highest price since the stock’s nosedive came to a slow halt last fall. In after hours trading, prices dropped slightly to $30.71. Take a look at Facebook share price performance over the last six months:

This kind of uptick has put Facebook stock squarely in the “most improved” category for consumer-facing tech companies, with share prices rising around 35 percent in the past six months:

Shares have been closing above 13-day and 50-day exponential moving averages (EMAs), indicating bullish performance for the near future.

The company’s initial public offering saw shares trading in the low to mid-$40s before the bell; throughout the day and the months to follow, share prices dropped dramatically. However, as many analysts and investors pointed out, Facebook was and is still at the beginning, both in terms of share price and revenue.

“This is an eight-year-old company,” pointed out Rebecca Lieb, an Altimeter Group analyst. “When Google went public, they had only recently developed ad products. Facebook is at the beginning of mobile products, advertising products — and it hasn’t even started with commerce products.”

“Facebook has just scratched the surface of its revenue and advertising,” said Menlo Ventures managing director Mark Siegel. “They’re going to grow with a much more diverse income stream than what they have today.”

And speaking of diverse revenue streams, let’s take a closer look at one of the stars of today’s show: Facebook’s mobile revenue.

Gifts

Another entirely new line item on Facebook’s budget is Gifts, which the company launched to a small group of users near the beginning of Q3 2012. Initially, the service, which let users send physical gifts to one another and let Facebook keep a small cut of the profits, seemed like a great addition to Facebook’s revenue streams.

“Gifting is a very unique form of e-commerce, and we thought there was a lot more innovation that could be going on there,” said Gifts creator Lee Linden in a recent VentureBeat interview. While he couldn’t get specific about how much Facebook takes in the transactions, he did say, “We’re starting with the U.S., and we’ll evaluate in the future what makes sense,” indicating that the company does plan to go global with the new e-commerce product.

“I think these can be big opportunities for us in the long term,” said Zuckerberg, “but for the next year at least, our work around ads will have by far the biggest impact on our business.”

Facebook has increased the amount of revenue it generates each day from advertisements that run in the News Feed fourfold over the course of the past 90 days.

The company revealed Tuesday that it now makes $4 million per day from feed placements, with roughly 75 percent of that revenue coming from ads running in the mobile News Feed. For comparison, Facebook closed the second quarter making $1 million per day on News Feed ads.

The News Feed revenue figures, disclosed in an earnings calls with investors and analysts, represent Facebook’s take per day at the end of the third quarter and are not representative of the entire quarter. The $4 million-per-day number, however, underscores the assertions that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg made last quarter about the growth opportunity of these ads.

The ads in question are Sponsored Stories, or targeted status updates that brands and marketers pay to push in front of more people, and are distinguished from the units that run in the right-hand column. Sponsored Stories appear in the News Feed on Facebook’s web and mobile products, and were first introduced in June of this year. Sandberg has called these units the cornerstone of Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy.

Sandberg added today that Facebook has a long way to go in making its feed ads better, more relevant, and of higher value. She promised that people will soon start to see progress in quality and that higher quality units would translate to even more revenue.

Save for mobile revenue growth, Facebook’s third quarter was an ordinary one, at least financially speaking. The social network reported Non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.12, just a tad above Wall Street’s expectations, and revenue of $1.262 billion for the quarter. In the quarter, advertising revenue totaled $1.09 billion, or 36 percent year-over-year growth.

Facebook closed the quarter with 1.01 billion monthly active users and 604 million monthly mobile active users.

Truck image via Shutterstock

Would you look at that? Facebook’s third quarter came in right in line with Wall Street’s expectations, with the primary reason being that the social network finally learned how to profit from its largest growing segment: mobile users.

In what normally would strike the fear of God into investors, Facebook announced Tuesday that it grew mobile monthly active users (MAUs) by 61 percent year-over-year to 604 million people. The quarter was ultimately a rather lackluster one for the company, financially speaking — save for mobile.

Facebook reported non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.12 and revenue of $1.262 billion. That’s just a tinge ahead of Wall Street’s $0.11 EPS predictions.

The 600-plus million mobile user figure, which does not include Instagram’s 100 million users, is striking. It means that roughly 60 percent of the social network’s active 1.01 billion-member base have migrated to the company’s mobile applications, where Facebook has the hardest time monetizating their attention. In the past, the company has admitted that mobile is one of its biggest challenges. But, perhaps, in a sign that the tides are changing, Facebook reported that it generated 14 percent of its Q3 2012 advertising revenue — or roughly $152.6 million by our estimate — from mobile.

Total advertising revenue was $1.09 billion for the quarter, which represents 86 percent of total revenue and 36 percent year-over-year growth.

The mobile advertising revenue figure is an interesting, first-time reveal, especially considering that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in July that the social network had only just then figured out how to make $500,000 a day from its mobile ads.

In the third quarter, Facebook pushed to make mobile monetization a priority, first and foremost by dramatically improving the speed and experience of its once-sluggish iOS application. The company launched mobile app install ads to allow developers and app-makers to pay to promote their applications to Facebook’s mobile audience. It also started showing more sponsored stories in the mobile News Feed. These ad units have become the cornerstone of Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said in July.

Sandberg, in an earnings call with investors, reiterated the statement today and said that Facebook’s mobile News Feed delivers an experience that works for ads. Facebook’s mobile monetization opportunity also happens to be the most misunderstood aspect of the company today, Zuckerberg said on the call.

Maybe that “stay focused and keep shipping” Facebook mantra is finally starting to pay off. Investors, at least, seem pleased. Facebook’s stock is trading up 8 percent in after-hours trading. Now, hopefully that confidence boost will carry through to November, when another lock-up period expires and 1.3 billion shares (owned by Facebook insiders including Zuck) will become tradable.

Photo Credit: Dan Fletcher/Facebook

Facebook’s stock fell 11 percent in after hours trading this afternoon, reaching a new low of $24, after the social network reported earnings for the first time as a public company.

Facebook barely exceeded Wall Street’s expectations with $1.18 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $0.12 for the second quarter. The company reported a net loss of $157 million, attributed to its share-based compensation plan. At the time of this post, Facebook’s stock was down 10 percent at $24.15.

The dip isn’t too shocking for Facebook’s stock, given how tumultuous it’s been so far. After going public at $42, Facebook’s stock closed at $38.37 on its first day of trading. The stock eventually fell to $33 on its second day. It certainly didn’t help that Nasdaq couldn’t keep its systems afloat during Facebook’s debut. Eventually, it became apparent that Facebook panicked and botched its IPO, as we’ve reported in-depth.

It’s not all doom and gloom for Facebook though: The company reported today that it has reached 955 million monthly active users — tantalizingly close to the coveted 1 billion figure. 543 million of those users access the site from mobile devices, a statistic which has no chance of slowing down anytime soon.

Photo via Shutterstock

Facebook will be joining the old guard next month with its first official earnings call, in which it will offer details on and explanations of its financial decisions over the past few months to investors and press.

The call is set for July 26, 2012, at 2 p.m. Pacific Time.

We’ll be on the line, of course, to report, in rabid, enthralled tones, every morsel of information we can pick up.

The social networking company only went public with its shares last month. Of course, that story is one you’ve heard ad nauseum already: the disastrous first day, the angry shareholders, and shocked experts.

The IPO itself was so bad that it caused at least one other tech startup to delay its own public offering, and VentureBeat executive editor Dylan Tweney said the whole debacle proved that “Wall Street is a sucker’s game.”

However, after plummeting by 30 percent in its first two weeks of public trading, Facebook’s stock has seen a small uptick in recent weeks. As of this writing, the stock is trading at $31.09 per share.

Here’s a chart showing its performance since the IPO:

During the earnings call, we’ll likely also hear more about Facebook’s Instagram acquisition, the $1 billion deal that rocked our sleepy little Valley to its foundation, as well as the company’s ongoing plans to monetize its billion-user network, from its bespoke payments system to its all-new ad programs that bring mobile into the mix.