Facebook profits up by 130 per cent to $3.6bn in fourth quarter

Revenues also surged from $5.8bn to $8.8bn

Facebook has posted quarterly profits of $3.6bn in the final quarter of 2016 - up by 128 per cent compared to the $1.5bn profit it achieved in the same period a year earlier.

The profits were generated on the back of similarly surging revenues, up from $5.8bn to $8.8bn. For the year, Facebook posted a profit of $10.2bn - up by 177 per cent on 2015 - on revenues of $27.6bn.

And the company expects to achieve revenues in excess of $33bn in 2017.

Mobile advertising continues to dominate its revenue streams, with 84 per cent of all advertising booked in this way, up from 80 per cent in the year-ago quarter.

Facebook's user numbers also continue to grow. It reported a daily active base of 1.23 billion users, up 18 per cent, year on year, and a monthly active base of 1.86 billion, up 17 per cent.

Daily mobile users are 1.15 billion, up 23 per cent year-on-year, while monthly mobile users hit 1.74 billion, an increase of 21 per cent year-on-year.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg welcomed the results and said the company was now pushing video as hard as it can as it sees this as the next big trend the firm can capitalise on.

"I've said before that I see video as a megatrend on the same order as mobile. That's why we're going to keep putting video first across our family of apps and making it easier for people to capture and share video in new ways," he said.

"To make it easier to find and watch videos, we've added a tab at the bottom of the Facebook app with top videos and recommendations. We've already rolled the tab out to everyone in the US, and we're planning to bring it to more countries soon."

Zuckerberg also said he sees artificial intelligence as key to helping the company get better at removing content in violation of its policies.

"I'm really focused on making sure that our company gets faster at taking the bad stuff down," said Zuckerberg.

"And we can do better with people, but ultimately the best thing that we can do is build AI systems that can watch a video and understand that it's going to be problematic and violate the policies of our community and that people aren't going to want to see it and then just not show it to people before bad experiences happen and things like violence gets spread."