102 Million Facebook Users Log In Just Via Mobile

Sites include Facebook.com . Published on August 15th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

There is a growing club of Facebook users that interact with the site exclusively on their mobile phones. Let’s just call this club the ‘mobile-only’ club.

In June this group totaled a whopping 102 million people which is a massive improvement from the 83 million people that were in the club at the end of March. Facebook gets around 543 million monthly mobile users and of that number, 87% don’t visit the desktop site at all.

This uptake in mobile interaction with the site is not necessarily good news for Facebook and its advertisers. If the majority of Facebook advertisers have ads optimized for desktop viewing and the actual viewers of the ads are their smartphones, this disconnect could cause advertising ROI to plummet. And this would be bad news for Facebook.

To make matters worse, Americans users seem to have a particular aversion for ads. Studies have shown that most Americans are willing to switch to mobile use when Facebook shows more than 7 ads on a page. Many do not even feel that making mobile ads work is the solution given the limited real estate that exists on mobile devices.

Whatever Zuckerberg and co does, it had better be quick. As a public company, investors won’t give him and his team any inordinate time to start making some money.