Mobile advertising revenue of nearly $8 billion in Q2 powers Facebook's growth

Key highlights:

• Facebook's advertising revenues in the second quarter grew by nearly 50%
• Its advertising revenues grew to $9.1 billion in Q2 2017
• Mobile advertising revenues in Q2 2017 stood at $7.97 billion

Facebook's advertising revenues in the second quarter grew by nearly 50%, as the social media company continued to grow its mobile advertising revenues. The company reported advertising revenues of $9.1 billion in Q2 2017 in comparison to 6.2 billion in the same quarter last year, a 47% growth.

The company's total revenues grew by $9.32 billion, up 45% from $6.43 billion in the corresponding quarter last year.

However, a major chunk of the advertising revenue came from mobile advertising. Facebook's mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 87% of the advertising revenue during Q2.

This has increased from 84% of the advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2016.

The mobile advertising revenues in Q2 2017 stood at $7.97 billion in comparison to $5.24 billion in the same quarter last year.

This shows that the social network site has continued to strengthen itself in the mobile advertising space by offering an array of online options to advertisers.

Facebook now has crossed 2 billion monthly active users as of June 30, 2017, an increase of 17% year on year (YoY). The daily active users on the site has grown to 1.32 billion on average for June 2017, a 17% growth YoY.

The company has been successful in attracting more ads into its Facebook News Feed, and has managed to attract more brands to its photo-sharing app Instagram, which now has more than 700 million users.

The company has been making more strides into video as it looks to capture the advertising pie of the television industry as people increase the time spend on Facebook and its affiliate products.

In the next few weeks it is expected to start a video service that will also include scripted shows. This will be user-generated content and is expected to drive the business ahead. This is in order to compete with others such as Netflix, Amazon and YouTube which are attracting content creators from across the world.

If it is successful it could pose a clear threat to Alphabet's advertising revenues from Google and YouTube. Facebook's revenue growth in Q2 has already outshone Alphabet's as it reported a 21% growth during the quarter.

If Facebook does manage to achieve success in its new video platform, a lot of ad spends going to YouTube could go to Facebook instead.

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