What mobile risk? Facebook says Sponsored Stories in News Feed are working

Mobile. It’s both Facebook’s biggest risk and greatest opportunity. The social network tried to stress the latter in its first-ever earnings call by sharing with investors and analysts that it’s now making roughly $500,000 a day from mobile ads. “By the end of June, Sponsored Stories in News Feed was at a run rate of over $1 million per day in revenue, and about half of that is coming from mobile,” Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said on the call. Socializing the News Feed gives Facebook a clear path to building a strong business on mobile, he added. Sponsored Stories, or status updates that double as advertisements, were added to the web and mobile News Feed back in June. Already, these ad units have become the cornerstone of Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy, COO Sheryl Sandberg said. “As measured by click-through rates, Sponsored Stories in News Feed perform multiple times better on both desktop and mobile than ads in the right-hand column,” she said. Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg tried to dispel the notion that Facebook will have trouble monetizing its massive user gains on mobile. Mobile continues to be the fastest growing area for the company; the social network hit 543 mobile monthly active users and posted year-over-year growth of 67 percent. “On average, mobile users are around 20 percent more likely to use Facebook on any given day,” Zuckerberg added. Mobile growth is way up and revenue is on its way. Facebook, thanks to Sponsored Stories, must have mobile all figured out then. http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/26/facebook-sponsored-stories-rev/