Mark Zuckerberg would have been grinning like the Cheshire Cat Wednesday with Facebook, Inc. beating market expectations in the second quarter off continued strong growth in mobile.

The social networking giant booked record high revenue of $4.04 billion for the quarter, compared to $2.9 billion for the same quarter of 2014, and ahead of market expectations of $3.99 billion.

Expenses though also increased with Facebook’s net income down 9.1 percent versus Q2 2014  to $719 million (25 cents per share) compared with $791 million (30 cents a share.)

Rumors of Facebook going out of fashion with millenials may have been somewhat exaggerated, with user numbers across the board up: daily active users clocked in at 968 million on average for June 2015, up 17% year-over-year; mobile daily active users were reports to be 844 million in June, up 29 percent versus June 2014; monthly active users grew to 1.49 billion, up 13 percent year-on-year, and mobile monthly active users were booked at 1.31 billion, up 23 percent versus June 2014.

The growth is Facebook’s revenue is mobile, mobile, mobile, with mobile advertising revenue now representing 76 percent of the company’s advertising revenue for the second quarter of 2015, up from 62 percent versus the same period last year; to put that in perspective in the broader market, market researcher eMarketer estimates that Facebook will capture 16 percent of the $69 billion mobile-ad market this year, second only to Google with a 35 percent market share.

“This was another strong quarter for our community,” Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Engagement across our family of apps keeps growing, and we remain focused on improving the quality of our services.”

Related services mystery

While there’s no question, perhaps the increase in expenses aside, that these are great numbers for Facebook, what the financials don’t do is provide a picture about what specifically is going on at Facebook owned services such as Instagram and WhatsApp; the fact that Facebook loves to talk about users on Facebook the site proper but fails to mention these services isn’t accidental, it’s purposeful, but the mystery is why?

There’s no solid contention that Instagram is performing poorly, and indeed there have been reports about advertising growth on the service previously, but why leave those numbers out?

WhatsApp is the bigger concern though because unlike competitors such as LINE Corp. and others there has been no clear monetization strategy discussed by Facebook in regards the app, and while it remains immensely popular outside of the United States, at some stage, given Facebook paid $19 billion for it, you’d expect it to start making some serious money.

Eventually, Facebook will come to the party and discuss what their subsidiaries are up to money wise, but in the mean time we will just have to wait.

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