By Choong Ming Ye

Facebook has surprised us before and it has done it again. Despite worried investors, its profits for the third quarter of 2013 beat expectations.

Facebook’s stock surged to $0.25 per share, beating investor expectations of $0.19 per share and revenue expectations of $1.91 billion; a share of Facebook stock is now worth $48.99. Facebook reported that this quarter’s net income of $425 million rose from a loss of $59 million in the same quarter of 2012 — an increase of nearly 820%.

Revenues stood at $2.02 billion in this third quarter — a 60% increase from last year’s $1.26 billion. Much of that revenue came in the form of advertising which comprised $1.80 billion or a 66% increase from the same quarter last year.

Of that advertisement revenue, mobile advertising comprised nearly half at 49%, which was a nominal increase from 41% of last year’s quarter. At its current rate, Facebook observed that mobile advertisements may outpace its desktop advertisement income.

While the decrease in teenage users may have investors’ worries well justified, Mark Zuckerberg seems to be more focused on long term growth.  He is “prepared for the next phase of [his] company, as [they] work to bring the next five billion people online and into the knowledge economy.”

Facebook’s relevance among teens, in this quarter of 2013, still remains high compared to other competitors. According to an analysis by Piper Jaffray Companies, Facebook commands 23% of the teenage market compared to Twitter at 26%, Instagram at 23%, Tumblr at 4% and Google+ at 3%. Steve Haller of Motley Fool commented that “a little perspective,” is needed and further commented that “no company can fully escape investors’ worries.”

Commenting on the declining teenager uses, CFO David Ebersman states that it “is a hard issue for [them] to measure,” but admitted it “is of questionable significance.”

Since Facebook is primarily a social media service company, it naturally tends to gravitate towards web-based services and should be measured accordingly. Zuckerberg commented that “20% of time in the U.S. spent in apps is on Facebook, according to comScore,” meaning one in every five person. “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg remarks that “[they’re] in the early stages of a major transformation in advertising.” She attributes much the shift from TV to digital media as a result of mobile app install ads and mobile app engagement ads. “The mobile app install add market didn’t even exist a few years ago…we’re pretty excited about this part of the market because we think it can grow so quickly,” Sandberg said.

In relation to its competition, Sandberg also mentioned that Facebook and Instagram users “spend more of their time on those two social networks on mobile than other popular streams like Youtube, Tumblr, Pandora and others combined in the U.S.

Ken Sena and Andrew McNellis of Evercore, an analyst group, believe that Instagram will help Facebook pull in as much as $340 million in 2014. They also estimated that this reported revenue will help boost a share of Facebook’s stock to $60.

According to Yahoo Finance, Facebook places fifth in comparison to its competitors by market cap of $120 billion as an information provider company. Tenecent Holdings Ltd currently has the largest market cap at $769 billion, followed by Baidu, Inc. at $722 billion, Yahoo! Inc. at $479 billion and Google Inc. at $345 billion.

In spite of not completely satisfying investors, Facebook is clearly in it for the long haul. As Zuckerberg states in his initial filing with the SEC, “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”