Facebook Tops Q4 Estimates on Strong Mobile Growth

Facebook, the biggest social network on the planet, keeps getting bigger — and its users are more mobile and consume more video than ever.

The company posted revenue of $3.85 billion for the fourth quarter of 2014, up 49% year over year and beating analyst expectations, as the social giant grew to 1.39 billion average monthly active users worldwide (up 13%) at the end of last year and boosted mobile advertising dollars.

Accoridng to Variety, Facebook also topped Wall Street forecasts with adjusted earnings of 54¢ per share for the last three months of 2014, up 69% year over year. Analysts had expected the company to post $3.77 billion in revenue and adjusted EPS of 48¢.

Underscoring Facebook’s focus on video, chairman-CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts that the service in December delivered an average of 3 billion video views per day — up from 1 billion daily over the summer of 2014. According to the company, U.S. users now watch an average of at least one video per day on the site; it’s worth noting that Facebook’s tally includes autoplay videos that users do not click on.