'Thriving' Facebook sees big gains on mobile - CNET

Though phone sales growth is stagnating around the world, Facebook said it's finding new ways to attract advertisers through a combination of audience scale and new technology that shows the right ads to the right people.

It's also proving to be a mobile juggeaut: More than 90 percent of the 1.59 billion Facebook's monthly active users access the service through a phone or tablet. That percentage also applies to the 1.04 billion people who use Facebook every day. The scale translated into big money in the last three months of last year. The company on Wednesday said 80 percent of the $5.6 billion it rang up in ads during the fourth quarter were shown on mobile devices.

"Heading into 2016, it's clear that consumers have shifted to mobile, and businesses know they need to catch up," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, said on a conference call with analysts.

Investors clearly liked the results. Shares rose more than 12 percent in after hours trading.

Using Facebook more

Facebook's growing list of features have helped to fuel its success. About 400 million people now use its Instagram photo-sharing service while more than 800 million folks use Messenger to communicate directly with one another.

Facebook has also expanded the types of things people can share on Facebook Messenger, such as videos, photos and stickers -- the company's equivalent of emojis. That, Zuckerberg said, has helped Facebook lea how to tu Messenger into more of a business than merely a feature of its service.