Asia once again central to Facebook growth as region reaches 426 million monthly active users

Facebook’s newest earnings report (for Q3 2014) reveals yet more strong growth in user numbers across Asia. While Europe and the US and Canada edged up only slightly in terms of monthly active users (MAUs) in the past quarter, Asia spurted from 410 million MAUs in Q2 to a new high of 426 million. Growth in the region’s numbers slipped a bit, but there have been fluctuations before.

Growing faster than any other region, Asia helped Facebook grow to a global total of 1.35 billion MAUs, up 2.5 percent from the previous quarter.

In Q2 we noted that Facebook passed a new milestone as it exceeded US$1 in average revenue from its Asian users. In the newest data, that average revenue per user (ARPU) figure climbed again to US$1.16. But, as ever, most of it comes from advertising, and Facebook is clearly failing to get its users in Asia to spend money on the social network.

Facebook’s 426 million Asia MAUs generated a total of US$469 million in advertising revenue, out of a total of US$2.96 billion from ads.

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There’s still room for growth for Facebook, especially across Asia. Facebook’s MAUs for US, Canada, and Europe grew by only 13.6 percent in the past two years, but the number rocketed by 53.8 percent in Asia in the same time-frame. As A16z analyst Benedict Evans points out in a presentation published today, most of the growth in online usage is now mobile, and smartphones are now helping the world’s “unconnected” to get online in huge numbers (see chart below). A great many of those will be in Asia.