Talk about climbing a wall of worry.
It turns out that millions of nosy moms who once joined Facebook to keep digital tabs on their networking teens are leading the nimble transformation of the social networking site from desktop to mobile — a fact that was driven home by a rocking earnings report on Thursday.
Facebook, the stock that almost everyone on Wall Street loved to hate, had its best day since going public in the spring of 2012 — up 30 percent on the session.
The move came on the heels of spectacular numbers for the spring quarter, with the company ringing up a 53 percent sales increase. More important, 41 percent of those revenues came from mobile ad sales, as mobile users exploded during the period and Facebook expanded advertising on its news feed.
Indeed, while tweens and teens continue to embrace Facebook, with or without a parental green light (though even founder Mark Zuckerberg admits the under-20 crowd is notoriously hard to measure, since many lie about their age), somewhat older — and, in particular, female — users are driving mobile ad sales — the holy grail for social-networking companies.
According to Digital Flash NY, 64 percent of Facebook users are now women, and 18 percent of them update their pages daily, almost twice the activity of their male counterparts.
In the second quarter, 225 billion minutes were logged by Facebook users on their mobile app versus just 18 billion minutes on the Twitter app, favored by men.
Back on Wall Street, one of the few who got the Facebook play correct is William Martin of Raging Capital.
In a letter to investors a week before the huge Facebook rally, Martin said he believes Facebook is “only in the top of the third inning in terms of monetizing its massive advertising inventory.”
Yes, with mobile ad spending projected to come in at less than $8 billion dollars this year, the sky seems to be the limit for the companies that can capture a good chunk of the growing pie.
With its second-quarter results and $10 billion in cash, Facebook is a market darling once again.