Facebook now makes $4M per day from News Feed ads

The company revealed Tuesday that it now makes $4 million per day from feed placements, with roughly 75 percent of that revenue coming from ads running in the mobile News Feed. For comparison, Facebook closed the second quarter making $1 million per day on News Feed ads.

The News Feed revenue figures, disclosed in an earnings calls with investors and analysts, represent Facebook’s take per day at the end of the third quarter and are not representative of the entire quarter. The $4 million-per-day number, however, underscores the assertions that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg made last quarter about the growth opportunity of these ads.

The ads in question are Sponsored Stories, or targeted status updates that brands and marketers pay to push in front of more people, and are distinguished from the units that run in the right-hand column. Sponsored Stories appear in the News Feed on Facebook’s web and mobile products, and were first introduced in June of this year. Sandberg has called these units the cornerstone of Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy.

Sandberg added today that Facebook has a long way to go in making its feed ads better, more relevant, and of higher value. She promised that people will soon start to see progress in quality and that higher quality units would translate to even more revenue.

Save for mobile revenue growth, Facebook’s third quarter was an ordinary one, at least financially speaking. The social network reported Non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.12, just a tad above Wall Street’s expectations, and revenue of $1.262 billion for the quarter. In the quarter, advertising revenue totaled $1.09 billion, or 36 percent year-over-year growth.

Facebook closed the quarter with 1.01 billion monthly active users and 604 million monthly mobile active users.

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