Quartely earnings push Facebook share prices to an all-time high

It looks like yesterday’s quarterly earnings report all but erased any ill feelings about Facebook’s mood experiment — the stock reached an all-time high today.

Facebook’s share price hit a record high of $76.90 per share today, after closing at $71.29 per share yesterday.

The boost comes just after Facebook released its quarter two earnings. A thrust in mobile advertising revenue helped push overall revenue and profit above analyst expectations. During the second quarter earnings meeting, Facebook announced that its mobile advertising revenue had shot up 151 percent this quarter, accounting for well over half of all advertising revenue.

Facebook’s midday stock price of $76.31 drives the company’s valuation up to nearly $200 billion, priming Facebook to rival IBM, which holds No. 4 spot in terms of top publicly listed companies, says Reuters.

But before you run off to buy shares of Facebook, the Federal Reserve warned just last week that social media stocks may be overvalued. The statement caused their prices to dip slightly.

It’s not like investors don’t know this. Though Facebook’s IPO in 2012 was awaited with sweaty palms, there was some ambivalence about how well in would fair down the road. Facebook’s stock has definitely been on the up, though that hasn’t been without pitfalls. As Reuters notes, the stock fell “for months” after its initial launch. Part of the possible trepidation about Facebook had to do with the company’s capability to develop a consistent revenue stream.

The company has also suffered some rebuke for its policies on user data as well as its mood manipulation experiment, which was done without user consent.

What yesterday’s earnings showed is that Facebook may have found a reliable way to monetize with mobile advertising.

“I mean look this is a company that a little bit more than two years ago they had no mobile ad business at all,” says Scott Kessler at S&P Capital IQ. Mobile revenue now accounts for 62 percent of all advertising revenue for the company — that’s a pretty big jump in a small amount of time. “It’s pretty impressive, especially when you look at the other large cap companies in the same size range,” Kessler says.

In the last quarter Apple saw a 6 percent increase in revenue, while Google saw 20 percent growth in revenue. With a roughly 60 percent rise in revenue, Facebook is well ahead of the pack.

“They figured out how to effectively monetize through mobile advertising. A lot of companies are still struggling there, and they’ve cracked the code,” says Kessler.

Not only that, but Facebook is thinking ahead with its acquisition of Liverail for growing mobile video ads.

“I think for a long time television was for creative storytelling and online ads were for targeted text-based results, but were’ seeing that change,” COO Sheryl Sandberg said on yesterday’s earnings call. If mobile really is the future of video advertising, investors really do have a reason to be excited.