Zuckerberg talks mobile growth, standalone apps during Facebook earnings call

Thought Facebook was going to turn into a wasteland soon? Well, **Princeton** and other naysayers need not hold their breath, since the social networking website has managed to deliver its **strongest revenue growth** in two years today.   Facebook posted a profit of $523 million in the fourth quarter of 2013, up from $64 million last year. As far as the revenue goes, it has managed to show $2.59 billion in revenue, beating analyst estimates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO said during his conference call with investors, “We’re very pleased with the growth of our ad business, especially on mobile.” He added, “I expect 2014 will the year when we begin to deliver new and engaging types of mobile experiences.”   Of course, Zuckerberg was rather delighted with the way the mobile has been growing for Facebook, he had bet heavy on it last year and it seems to be paying off now. Facebook’s monthly active users on mobile have been growing at a breakneck speed, up 39 percent from last year, with 945 million of them. Ad revenue on mobile reached 53 percent, meaning more than half of Facebook’s total advertising business.   Zuck also mentioned that building an app portfolio is one of the top priorities at Facebook. He cited positive momentum from Messenger and, of course, Instagram to mark the company’s mobile way forward. He said that Facebook’s apps and tools are about creating a “set of products that help you share any set of content you want with the audience you want.”   As far as competing with Twitter goes, Zuckerberg mentions that Facebook is trying to make the experience of sharing stories on the website publicly a lot easier and much more interesting, and said that the company is working actively towards it.   Now while that sounds good, it still leaves a huge question mark about the declining teen usage of Facebook, a fact that even the company acknowledged during an earnings call in October last year. Zuckerberg said that there was no new data on teens to report but he reported that content engagement is going up on Facebook steadily. Even while people engage with stories that involve memes – something teens love – they don’t rate them too high.   The News Feed algorithm is an ever-evolving one, and we might see something else ranked higher later. With Graph Search rolling out steadily and its integration into the News Feed, Zuckerberg says that it is a multi-year effort and it is yet to make an appearance on mobiles. He even spoke a bit about Facebook’s AI and his involvement with Internet.org.   As far as deep learning goes Facebook is helping its AI to understand connectedness of what people are saying and he said that Facebook will be involved actively to bring the world online.So what’s on Zuck’s plate for the next few years? He wishes to keep aside three years to build out sharing, five to use your network to sort out problems and in 10 more years see the full impact of Internet.org.