Facebook Inc. posted stronger than-expected results for the third quarter on Tuesday, sending its shares sharply higher in after-hours trading. The company saw advertising revenue growth accelerate from the second quarter, and for the first time it gave details on how much of its money comes from mobile ads. That seemed to reassure investors that the world's biggest online social network is on the right path to growth.
In a conference call with analysts, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered a question about the ways Facebook makes money.
QUESTION: I guess I was wondering given the monetization products that you mentioned at the start of the call, if you could maybe rank (them in) order for us. How would you rank those in terms of their ability to drive revenue in (2013) and which one should (we) be watching most closely?
ANSWER: Yeah, I mean, I look at it in terms of — we're building a lot more integrated ad products now, right? And if you look at where we were historically, most of the ad inventory was in this right-hand column, it was a separate experience and we had this ad team and their job was to kind of drive that service, and they could provide that service to every other product team. So the messages team focuses on building the best messages product and now and they can run that on the side to make money.
Now what we're basically doing is we've told every product team that they're responsible for the advertising experience within each of their products, so the News Feed team is coming up with better ad experiences than just being able to run general ads on the side. And what we're seeing is that across each of these consumer products that we have, we're just getting more tailored advertising experiences.
So I think there are multiple ways to look at it. I mean you could look at it by market segment for advertisers or you can look at it by consumer products, that tends to be how I look at more. But I mean whether it's News Feed or the mobile apps that we're building, or Timeline or any of these things, I think we're just going to see a lot better products for both users and advertisers.
