The most interesting stuff we learned from Facebook’s earnings call

On its quarterly earnings call Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg and friends sketched out Facebook‘s future in broad strokes. But in between the world domination bits, the reigning king of social media managed to sprinkle in a few juicy new tidbits.

Below, we’ve collected the most interesting stats and quotes that sum up the company’s report for the second quarter of 2014.

• More than one billion people now use Facebook on their phones every month.
• In June, 1.32 billion people used Facebook across platforms (monthly active users).
• Americans spend a whopping average of 40 minutes a day on the service. Facebook accounts for one out of every five minutes spent on mobile devices in the U.S. (Whoa.)

• In Q2 2014, Facebook raked in $2.91 billion in revenues, up 61% from the same quarter a year ago. Ad revenue made up 62% of that, totaling $2.68 billion. 

• Every day, users make one billion search queries on the service. Maybe graph search is finally paying off.
• The company is seeing a decline in its number of desktop users. Meanwhile, mobile usage on Facebook apps continues to thrive.
• “We’re very much in investment mode” says Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It sounds like after snatching up WhatsApp and Oculus, among others, the company remains on the prowl for more acquisitions with long term value.
• Zuckerberg compared spin-off apps like Instagram and Facebook Messenger to a younger version of Facebook: “I liken where we are now with something like Messenger to Facebook during 2006 or 2007.” According to Zuck, Facebook was “primarily a consumer product” back then, long before it grew up and mutated into the world’s biggest social ad platform.
• The World Cup prompted 3 billion interactions on the social network, which we assume includes comments, likes, and football-crazed rage posts.
• When questioned about testing a buy button, COO Sheryl Sandberg made it clear that the company has no plans for selling any of its own stuff: “I think commerce is really important… but I don’t think people should confuse that with Facebook selling things directly.”

Photo by Kris Krug/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)