With strong quarter growth, Facebook hits 1.71 billion monthly users

New York: Showing strong revenue and profit growth, social networking giant Facebook has added 60 million monthly users in the second quarter of 2016 to reach 1.71 billion users while scoring $6.44 billion in revenue -- blowing the earlier estimates of $6.02 billion.

Its social network operation raked in $2.05 billion in profit compared to $719 million a year ago.

Wall Street on Thursday reacted to the positive earnings with a 7.5 percent surge in Facebook's shares ($132 per share) in after-hours trading.

While daily active users (DAUs) were 1.13 billion on average for June - an increase of 17 percent year-over-year, mobile DAUs were 1.03 billion on average for the same month - an increase of 22 percent year-over-year.

Monthly active users were 1.71 billion - an increase of 15 percent year-over-year and mobile MAUs were 1.57 billion - an increase of 20 percent year-over-year.

This is Facebook's 16th beat out of 17 quarters since it went public at $38 per share, Tech Crunch reported.

"Our community and business had another good quarter. We're particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services," Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, said in a statement.

Facebook now sees two billion searches per day, up from 1.5 billion a year ago.

According to Zuckerberg, people searching for what others are saying about certain topics is driving that growth, which highlights Facebook's on-going quest to win public chatter ? as space Twitter has long ruled. However, Facebook doesn't plan to rush to monetize search.

Advertising on mobile devices accounted for 84 percent of Facebook's $6.2 billion in advertising sales, Wall Street Journal reported.

gRevenue generated from mobile ads jumped 80 percent in the second quarter, faster than Facebook's overall 59 percent advertising growth rate," it added.

The average revenue per user is now $3.82, up 15 percent from last quarter.

One billion people are now using Facebook Messenger every month. Messenger is now the second-most popular iOS app of all time, behind Facebook.

Facebook-owned Instagram has now reached 500 million users.

Earlier, although it added three million users -- one million more that what analysts had expected -- the not-so-promising second quarter earnings results led to the shares of micro-blogging website Twitter tumbling this week which wiped out nearly 10 percent from its share price in after-market trading.

The company posted quarterly revenue of $602 million, up 20 percent year-over-year and reported $107 million GAAP net loss ($0.15 per share) with quarterly non-GAAP net income of $93 million ($0.13 per share).

A year ago, the year-over-year growth was 61 percent and two years back, it was a whooping 124 percent.