Without changing signals you can still make meaningful long term progress through ranking, delivery, and format improvements.
Advertising accounted for $25.4 Billion of their revenue, up from $17.4 Billion in the same quarter last year, an increase of 46%
Revenue from other sources was $732 Million, up from $297 million in the same quarter last year, an increase of 146%
I don't debate that countries like India have large Facebook usage, but the question I asked was - is there growth coming from the young users in countries like India? Because that goes against my experience, albeit limited to Western countries.
If it's coming from young users in India and similar countries, that's really interesting to me because it shows that teenage trends are not as universal as I'd expect.
If that's not the case, then where is the growth coming from?
Genuine question (unsure why downvoted) and want to get to the bottom of it.
Curious how well understood the mechanics are of this. I've been fascinated by how clever the whole model works. They know revenue growth needs to outpace their ability to increase available ad space (so user growth or attention growth). So they are heavily reliant on data to improve ad targeting so they can drive more conversion per ad impression.
The power of the ad auction model is that 100% of the improved efficiency of ad targeting is translated to revenue for Facebook. Advertisers will pay $X for a conversion in their ROI calculations - so Facebook will get the maximum amount the market will pay a certain for a given conversion. Advertisers are actually a little worst off as targeting gets better - the conversion cost stays the same and the number of impressions goes down.
To keep growing revenue at this pace, Facebook needs to continually feed the beast with better and better data so they can squeeze more and more conversions out of their existing ad space.
The only other two ways to grow revenue is more users and more time from users. Which is getting tougher and tougher. That's why this Apple fight is so important to Facebook - it's really their lifeblood right now.