Facebook’s Mobile Tipping Point: 48% Of Daily Users Are Now Mobile-Only, Instagram’s Blowing Other Social Apps Out Of The Water

Facebook’s Q3 earnings paint a very strong picture for the company on the mobile front, and they show that the company is moving closer to a tipping point where mobile usage and revenues will soon be outweighing that of desktop.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg today noted during the company’s earnings call that 48 percent of users on a given day are only accessing it from mobile. That comes as nearly half – 49 percent – of the company’s advertising revenues, its key revenue driver, now come from mobile ads. That means nearly $890 million in Q3 was made from Facebook’s different mobile advertising units such as app install ads and engagement ads.

This shows that Facebook is on track to match the prediction it made in Q2 that mobile revenues would pass desktop by the end of this year.

Later, CEO Sheryl Sandberg revealed some striking figures that point to just how much time consumers are spending on Facebook’s mobile properties. Instagram, the very popular mobile-first, photo-based social network, now has 150 million monthly active users. It accounts for one of every five minutes spent on mobile in the U.S., Sandberg noted. And that is even having an impact on desktop: Instagram accounts for one in 8 minutes on desktop, she said.

What does Facebook’s mobile traffic work out to compared to other popular properties? Sandberg noted that Facebook accounts for more mobile minutes in the U.S. than “YouTube, Pandora, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, AOL, Snapchat and LinkedIn – combined.” (It seems that this stat was taken from comScore research, which actually combined Instagram and Facebook.)

Mobile-only users on a monthly basis now stand at 254 million. With 1.19 billion MAUs overall, it means that 21.3 percent of MAUs are now mobile-only. While that is less than half the DAU percentage, it is still a growing number, up 2.3 percentage points from 19 percent in Q2.

The same may not be said for desktop. CFO David Ebersman noted that daily actives on web “declined modestly” in contrast to what is happening on mobile. Facebook’s daily active users on mobile worldwide now stand at 507 million, up by 38 million over Q2; while monthly active users are up to 874 million, up 55 million from Q2.