Facebook's massive growth continues as user base nears 2 billion mark

Facebook's user base is getting bigger by the day with its latest earnings report showing the social media giant is inching closer to the two billion mark on a monthly basis. According to the company's latest earnings report, the monthly users reached 1.86 billion, up 17% from a year earlier and the most by any social media platform.

For the quarter ending December 2016, the company reported a profit of $3.57bn (£2.82bn), more than double the $1.56bn reported a year ago.

In terms of everyday users too, the company is far ahead of its competitors, managing to get 1.23 billion people to use its platform of whom 1.15 billion do it from their mobile devices.

Facebook's ad business did well despite earlier caution that ad growth would likely slow "meaningfully" due to limits on ad load. Ad revenue which now contributes 84% to the total revenue was up by 53% compared to last year.

Company chief Mark Zuckerberg took to the platform to maintain that video content will continue as its priority and the company expects a major ramp-up in hiring and spending during 2017.

"Our biggest focus continues to be putting video first across our family of apps. More than 150 million people now use Instagram Stories every day. We've also launched our new camera in Messenger and have started rolling it out in Facebook as well," said Zuckerberg on Facebook.

A day prior to the earnings, news came in of Facebook planning to take on the likes of Netflix to get into original video content. Facebook has already made efforts to build its own video streaming capabilities along with adding similar functionalities to Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Its Facebook Live has become key element in its recent promotions.