Facebook is expected to launch its highly anticipated public stock offering in just a few weeks, perhaps sometime in mid-May. However, as part of that process, the company has to release its current financial numbers to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Today, Facebook did indeed make such a filing with the SEC, revealing its earnings for the first quarter of 2012.
As part of its results, Facebook announced that it now has 901 million monthly users. That's a big increase compared to the 845 million monthly users that the company says it had just two months ago when it first filed for its IPO. Facebook says that it now has 500 million daily active users, compared to 483 million daily users in February.
Facebook says it now generates 3.2 billion comments and "Likes" a day, compared to 2.7 billion in February. 300 million photos are also uploaded to the site each day, compared to 250 million per day two months ago. Finally, Facebook now has 125 billion friendships between its users, compared to 100 billion friendships in February.
For the first quarter of 2012, which ended on March 31, Facebook said it brought in $1.06 billion in revenue, 45 percent higher than the same period a year ago. However, the company's net income came in at $205 million, lower than the $302 million in net income in generated at the same time a year ago. Facebook added that 23 percent of its income in the first quarter came from money generated by the game publisher Zynga.
Facebook has been spending a lot of money in its current quarter. Earlier this month it bought Instagram for a stock-cash deal that's worth $1 billion, and it announced today that it has spent $550 million to acquire a number of patents from Microsoft.
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