Facebook profits are way up as it grabs all the advertising money

Facebook just released it’s latest results, and Mark Zuckerberg has every reason to like them. The advertising juggernaut earned over $4.2 million every hour for three months to the end of June — underlining once again how the social network and Google now account for virtually all digital advertising growth today.

We’re used to seeing Facebook report record numbers, but its latest set of results shows that it’s capable of sustaining those huge growth figures – especially on mobile. There’s further bad news for its competitors, as Facebook is only just beginning a major push into video, and Mark Zuckerberg outlined plans Wednesday for monetizing the company’s messaging apps.

Here are the figures you need to know:

• $9.32 billion — Facebook’s revenue for the second quarter of the year was up 77 percent on last year’s figure, which was already up a huge 177 percent on 2015
• $3.89 billion — Facebook’s net profit rose 71 percent, helping to push its shares to an all-time high in after-hours trading
• 1 billion — The number of monthly users for each of Facebook’s messaging apps Messenger and WhatsApp — and Zuckerberg says he now wants to move “a little faster” in monetizing them
• 87 percent — The share of revenue generated by mobile ads and the company now wants to push into video, as it seeks to compete with the like of YouTube, Snapchat, Netflix, and even traditional TV broadcasters
• 20,658 — The number of Facebook employees as of June 30, representing a 43 percent increase in the space of a year. A lot of that growth is coming at its research and development department, which has seen a 25 percent budget increase year-on-year

Facebook and Google account for 75 percent of the U.S. digital ad market, and these figures highlight how deftly the two companies have are grabbed a huge slice of any growth in digital ad sales. This situation recently led a group representing more than 2,000 U.S. newspapers to ask Congress for an antitrust safe harbor against what it considers a “duopoly.”