Facebook's dying? HA! Get ready for another DECADE of us – Zuck

Money machine spits out $1.5bn net income for the year

Facebook raked in revenues of $7.87bn in 2013, up 55 per cent on the previous year, according to company filings published today.

The social network's latest finance reports show that in the final quarter of 2013 alone, sales climbed 63 per cent year-on-year to top out at $2.59bn.

On the 12 months to December 31, 2013, and after costs were factored in, Facebook took home a net income of $1.5bn, up from $53m in 2012: that seems like an incredible turnaround, but the social network took a $1.5bn hit in IPO-related expenses in 2012, hence the low figure.

Comparing non-GAAP net income is more sane: in 2013, that figure was $2.2bn for the year, up 67 per cent on 2012's $1.37bn.

"It was a great end to the year for Facebook," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook in 2004, on the 2013 Q4 sales bonanza. "We're looking forward to our next decade and to helping connect the rest of the world."

The closing three months of 2013 were particularly strong for Facebook as revenues from advertising took a leap over their 2012 levels: serving up ads to social networking users brought Facebook a total of $2.34bn in the last quarter, up 75 per cent on the year.

Of those advertising revenues, an estimated 53 per cent came from mobile ads. By comparison, just 23 per cent of revenues in 2012 were generated by mobile ad sales.

On average, the company estimated that it pulled in some 1.23 billion monthly active users, while 757 million users were active on the site every day. Again on average, 556 million daily users reached the site with mobile devices; 945 million people accessed the site from a handheld each month. That means most active users hit the website from a mobile gadget at least once a month, on average – 76.8 per cent, in fact.

The strong quarter comes in spite of what some pundits see as the impending twilight of Facebook's popularity. A study from Princeton recently suggested that the company would soon face a mass exodus of users. That report was widely panned and Facebook itself essentially filleted the argument with an artfully-crafted retort.

The company, when not batting away concerns over privacy and government surveillance, is becoming something of a star in the server space as it continues to share its engineering gains with the world through the Open Compute Project. The effort has yielded innovative and low-cost systems including a massive Blu-ray based archiving appliance. ®