Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is looking at more worthwhile ventures to dig his hands into. Following the acquisition or creation of various investments such as Messenger, Paper, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR and Titan Aerospace, among other things, he is planning to launch more standalone apps as its social network goes more and more mobile, boasting of 1.01 billion of members on the small screens.
In a first-quarter earnings call, the CEO presented good numbers that far exceeded expectations even that of Wall Street's, despite a total decline of 17 percent in advertising impressions that Facebook points to the change from desktop display ads to sponsored newsfeed ads similar to the ones in the Facebook's mobile interface.
His company received revenues of $2.5 billion, as opposed to Wall Street's estimate of $2.36 billion, and a net income of $642, of which mobile or portable device got 59 percent of advertising revenue as opposed to 53 percent in the previous quarter. Facebook also has 1.28 billion of monthly users now, of which 63 percent or 802 million are active daily users and 609 million are daily mobile users. Meanwhile, its Instagram has 200 million members and WhatsApp has half a billion users.
"Our goal is every time you open Facebook, every time you look at the newsfeed... you see something that genuinely delights you," COO Sheryl Sandberg said, pointing to the fact that users follow newsfeed ads that are of their interests. "I think we hit that more than we used to, but we still have a long way to go."
Zuckerberg also laid out its plans to roll out more standalone applications. He says Facebook's Creative Labs would create and launch apps that have particular purposes. Though he also admits that the some of the new apps will be experimenting on more private content or forms of expression, which not one of them would be a moneymaker. If the apps would bring in more users, the social network would see itself growing to 100 million users more. If and when it thrives in the market, that's the only time the company will make money from it.
"It will probably take a few years for those to even get to the stage that Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp are at," said Zuckerberg.
Recall that while some apps went big on the market, some made otherwise such as the Poke and Home apps. The Paper app, Creative Lab's first app, has yet to disclose its number of users, but research says its users read around 80 stories in a day. Zuckerberg also says that while they are pleased with the initial reaction they received from Paper users, they are still in the process of refining the app before further promotion.
