How You’re Making Facebook a Money Machine

In such moments you are most likely checking Facebook. More of you will be doing that than tweeting, searching on Google, checking stock prices on Yahoo or reading articles like this. And that constant lure, a fix you can easily satisfy both on a phone and a desktop computer, explains why Facebook is pulling ahead of every other large technology company right now. Your addiction is making Facebook astonishingly profitable. Put a little more kindly, your emotional and intellectual interactions on the social network are creating a great place for companies to advertise. What this means in dollars and cents for Facebook can be seen in numbers contained in its first-quarter financial results.

For the United States and Canada, Facebook pulled in $11.86 in advertising revenue per user in the first quarter. That’s what advertisers are willing to pay to catch your attention as you argue with your friends and relatives over Donald Trump or coo over baby pictures or both. Facebook’s revenue was up over 50 percent from a year earlier, while its net income soared nearly 200 percent. Its stock leapt as the wider market fell.