Suddenly, Facebook is killing it in mobile.
After generating $0 dollars in mobile ad revenues during the first quarter and an immaterial amount during the second quarter, Facebook today announced that 14 percent of its advertising revenue came from mobile ads in Q3 2012.
That's $152.6 million – $610.4 million annualized.
But here's the thing: Facebook's mobile advertising business is actually much bigger than that.
During a conference call with analysts to discuss the earnings, Facebook CFO David Ebersman said that ads in the Facebook News Feed now generate $4 million per day.
He said three-quarters of those revenues come from mobile News Feed ads.
75% of $4 million is $3 million. $3 million per day over 365 days is…$1.1 billion.
Here's the full Ebersman quote, so you can read it for yourself:
In terms of the feed revenue at the end of the second quarter we disclosed that at that point we were running about about $1 million a day and we use that metric because we just started ramping up towards the end of the quarter so we felt like giving you the numbers for the whole quarter was not representative of where we were. Those numbers continue to ramp through the quarter. We ended the third quarter with more than $4 million a day coming from feed and about three quarters of that coming from mobile feed. And going forward I think we'll stick to the metric of mobile as a percentage of revenue.
Nine months after having a mobile ad business that generates $0 per year, Facebook now has a mobile ad business generating $1 billion per year.
AND: Facebook hasn't even started putting ads in Instagram yet, which now has 100 million registered users, up from 27 million when it bought it in April.
It's funny: Mobile was supposed to be Facebook's weakness. It's not.
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